If by chance he slipped now and again into his old light-heartedness or levity, others were ready to discover an undercurrent of diplomatic intention beneath his inanity and silliness. he only says exactly as much as he means to say," thought these excellent people.英文原著 · 《A Woman of Thirty》
If the great Cause of Man, and Man's work in God's Earth, got no furtherance from the Arabian Caliph, then no matter how many scimetars he drew, how many gold piasters pocketed, and what uproar and blaring he made in this world,--_he_ was but a loud-sounding inanity and futility; at bottom, he _was_ not at all. Let us honor the great empire of _Silence_, once more! The boundless treasury which we do not jingle in our pockets, or count up and present before men! It is perhaps, of all things, the usefulest for each of us to do, in these loud times.--英文原著 · 《Heroes and Hero Worship》
Germain, see it too, as Fassmann did? And Louis XIV., he is at Versailles; drooping fast, very dull to his Maintenon. And our little Fritz in Berlin is a child in arms;--and the world is all awake as usual, while Fassmann strolls through this noisy inanity of show-booths, in the year 1713.英文原著 · 《History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 5》
-- St. tempera: see Webster, s.v. {a type of paint} tinglish: sharp? Zeno: founder of the Stoic philosophy. Carlino: some expressionless picture by Carlo, or Carlino, Dolci. His works show an extreme finish, often with no end beyond itself; some being, to use Ruskin's words, "polished into inanity".英文原著 · 《Introduction to Robert Browning》
All which is an additional reason for making a collection of the incredibly curious literature of Homoeopathy before that pseudological inanity has faded out like so many other delusions.英文原著 · 《Medical Essays》
So it is that Sir Joshua's theory seems to rest on an inclined plane, and is always glad of an excuse to slide, from the severity of truth and nature, into the milder and more equable regions of insipidity and inanity; I am sorry to say so, but so it appears to me.英文原著 · 《Table-Talk, Essays on Men and Manners》