Barren Quotes - Page 7

• Wilderness has been characterized as barren and unproductive; little can be grown in its sand and rock. But the crops of wilderness have always been its spiritual values - silence and solitude, a sense of awe and gratitude - able to be harvested by any traveler who visits.

  David Douglas

  Spiritual, Gratitude, Journey

  David Douglas (1989). “Wilderness Sojourn: Notes in the Desert Silence”, HarperCollins

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• All discussion of the ultimate nature of things must necessarily be barren unless we have some extraneous standards against which to compare them.

  James Jeans

  Science, Standards, Compare

  James Hopwood Jeans (1944). “The Mysterious Universe”, p.114, CUP Archive

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• That's what depression had wrought inside me: one, vast, barren rock garden-without the garden

  Peter McWilliams

  Depression, Garden, Rocks

  Peter McWilliams (1997). “Love 101: To Love Oneself Is the Beginning of a Lifelong Romance”, Mary Book / Prelude Press

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• When we skim along the surface of history we see little but the rough barren rocks that rise out of it.

  Augustus William Hare

  Rocks, History, Littles

  Augustus William Hare (1827). “Guesses at Truth”

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• The virtuosos look to the students of the world to do their share in the education of the great musical public. Do not waste your time with music that is trite or ignoble. Life is too short to spend it wandering in the barren Saharas of musical trash.

  Sergei Rachmaninoff

  Life Is Too Short, Musical, World

  "Great Pianists on Piano Playing". Book by James Francis Cooke, p. 217, 1999.

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• I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me that, by the want of pecuniary wealth, I have been nailed dawn to this my native region so long and steadily, and made to study and love this spot of earth more and more. What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering? The traveler's is but a barren and comfortless condition. Wealth will not buy a man a home in nature-house nor farm there. The man of business does not by his business earn a residence in nature, but is denaturalized rather.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Travel, Kindness, Home

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• In our methodical American life, we still recognize some magic in summer. Most persons at least resign themselves to being decently happy in June. They accept June. They compliment its weather. They complain of the earlier months as cold, and so spend them in the city; and they complain of the later months as hot, and so refrigerate themselves on some barren sea-coast. God offers us yearly a necklace of twelve pearls; most men choose the fairest, label it June, and cast the rest away.

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson

  Summer, Men, Weather

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2007). “Outdoor Studies, Poems”, p.55, Reprint Services Corporation

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• Such do not always understand the authors whose names adorn their barren pages, and which are taken, too, from the third or the thirtieth hand. Those who trust to such false quoters will often learn how contrary this transmission is to the sense and application of the original. Every transplantation has altered the fruit of the tree; every new channel, the quality of the stream in its remove from the spring-head.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Spring, Taken, Hands

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• Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it, We are happy now because God so wills it; No matter how barren the past may have been, 'T is enough for us now that the leaves are green; We sit in the warm shade and feel right well How the sap creeps up and the blossoms swell... The breeze comes whispering in our ear, That dandelions are blossoming near... Every thing is upward striving; 'T is as easy now for the heart to be true As for grass to be green or skies to be blue, - 'T is the natural way of living.

  James Russell Lowell

  Summer, Heart, Past

  James Russell Lowell, “The Vision Of Sir Launfal”

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• Marriage has for women many equivalents of joining a mass movement. It offers them a new purpose in life, a new future and a new identity (a new name). The boredom of spinsters and of women who can no longer find joy and fulfillment in marriage stems from an awareness of a barren, spoiled life. By embracing a holy cause and dedicating their energies and substance to its advancement, they find a new life full of purpose and meaning.

  Eric Hoffer

  Marriage, Names, Boredom

  Eric Hoffer (1980). “The True Believer”

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• Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Life, Two, Looks

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1952). “Life and Letters”

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• Principles are like a seed in the ground; they must continually be visited with heavenly influences or else your life will be a barren field.

  Thomas Traherne

  Principles, Fields, Influence

  Thomas Traherne (2010). “Centuries of Meditations”, p.298, Cosimo, Inc.

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• There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

  John Bowring

  Flower, Heart, Water

  John Bowring, “Blessings Of Instruction”

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• Unchecked, the dominating influences of money and of barren intellectualism would reduce the life of emotions to freezing point. And, unable to grasp the holier benefits of religion, the mysticism of the heart reacts in the art-intoxication. .... In this cold, irreligious and practical age the warmth of this devotion to art has kept alive many higher aspirations of our soul, which otherwise might readily have died, as they did in the middle of the last century.

  Abraham Kuyper

  Art, Soul, Age

  Abraham Kuyper (2007). “Lectures on Calvinism”, p.143, Cosimo, Inc.

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• To most humans, a universe consisting of particles banging about and doing what they have to do seems cold, barren, and without meaning. Meaning, however, is not something that floats in space, permeating the universe like a nebulous, mystical cloud. ... Meaning arises out of the working of the human mind, and therefore exists only in the human mind. The meaning of existence is whatever you want to make of it.

  Milton A. Rothman

  Space, Clouds, Mind

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• When thou cam'st first, Thou strok'st me and made much of me; wouldst give me Water with berries in't; and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night; and then I loved thee And showed thee all the qualities o' th' isle, The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.

  William Shakespeare

  Spring, Night, Light

  William Shakespeare (1998). “Four Late Plays”, p.357, Wordsworth Editions

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• The man who seeks one thing in life and but one, May hope to achieve it before life is done; But he who seeks all things, wherever he goes, Only reaps from the hopes which around him he sows, A harvest of barren regrets.

  Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton

  Regret, Ambition, Men

  "Lucile". Book by Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, 1860.

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• Speech may be barren; but it is ridiculous to suppose that silence is always brooding on a nestful of eggs.

  George Eliot

  Eggs, Silence, May

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• Our fruitless labours mourn, And only rich in barren fame return.

  Homer

  Return, Rich, Fame

  Homer (1822). “The Odyssey of Homer”, p.209

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• You may boldly say, you did not plough Or trust the barren and ungrateful sands With the fruitful grain of your religious counsels.

  Philip Massinger

  Religious, Failure, Ungrateful

  Philip Massinger, William Gifford, John Ferriar (1813). “The bandman. The renegado. The parliament of love. The Roman actor. The great Duke of Florence”, p.204

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• A man who has no love in him is as barren as a cloud with no moisture, a tree with no fruits or a cow yielding no milk; he is ever far from God and can never earn His Grace.

  Sathya Sai Baba

  Men, Clouds, Tree

  FaceBook post by Sri Sathya Sai Baba from Jan 24, 2017

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• The avaricious man is like the barren sandy ground of the desert which sucks in all the rain and dew with greediness, but yields no fruitful herbs or plants for the benefit of others.

  Zeno of Elea

  Rain, Men, Yield

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• I have sat through an Italian opera, til, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded street, to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention!

  Charles Lamb

  Music, Pain, Italian

  Charles Lamb (2008). “The Life, Letters, and Writings of Charles Lamb”, p.193, Cosimo, Inc.

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• In the condition of men, it frequently happens that grief and anxiety lie hid under the golden robes of prosperity; and the gloom of calamity is cheered by secret radiations of hope and comfort; as in the works of nature, the bog is sometimes covered with flowers, and the mine concealed in the barren crags.

  Samuel Johnson

  Lying, Flower, Grief

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1825). “The works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: with Murphy's essay”, p.33

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• For my part, I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew.

  Edmund Burke

  Teaching, Investigation, Method

  Edmund Burke (1824). “A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”, p.3

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