Desolate Quotes - Page 2

• Wisdom is sold in a desolate marketplace where none can come to buy.

  William Blake

  Marketplace

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• Those of faith who plant sacred thoughts in the uplands of time, the secret gardeners of the Lord in mankind's desolate hopes, may slacken and tarry but rarely betray their vocation.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Secret, May, Sacred

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1976). “Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion”, p.95, Macmillan

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• And so we remained till the red of the dawn began to fall through the snow gloom. I was desolate and afraid, and full of woe and terror. But when that beautiful sun began to climb the horizon life was to me again.

  Bram Stoker

  Beautiful, Fall, Snow

  Bram Stoker, Mort Castle (2014). “Dracula”, p.359, "F+W Media, Inc."

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• Penetrate deeply in the secret existence of anyone about you, even of the man or woman whom you count happiest, and you will come upon things they spend all their efforts to hide. Fair as the exterior may be, if you go in, you will find bare places, heaps of rubbish that can never be taken away, cold hearths, desolate altars, and windows veiled with cobwebs.

  Myrtle Reed

  Taken, Men, Effort

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• Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!

  Charles Darwin

  Ignorance, Law, Profound

  Charles Darwin (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Charles Darwin (Illustrated)”, p.3445, Delphi Classics

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• Armstrong described the lunar surface as 'beautiful.' I thought to myself, 'It's not really beautiful. It's magnificent that we're here, but what a desolate place we are visiting.'

  Buzz Aldrin

  Beautiful, Visiting, Surface

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• I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.

  Haruki Murakami

  Depressing, Moving, Rain

  "A Wild Sheep Chase". Book by Haruki Murakami, 1982.

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• We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent.

  Isabel Allende

  Peace, People, Eras

  Isabel Allende, John Rodden (2004). “Conversations with Isabel Allende: Revised Edition”, p.58, University of Texas Press

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• Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone? Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not for ever Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river, Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom, why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope?

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Beauty, Dream, Art

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1871). “The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete in One Volume”, p.366

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• Social Science, is not a 'gay science' but rueful, which finds the secret of this universe in 'supply and demand' and reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone. Not a 'gay science', no, a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, the dismal science

  Thomas Carlyle

  Ignorance, Gay, Men

  Thomas Carlyle (2014). “The Selected Works of Thomas Carlyle”, p.472, Lulu.com

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• I find it difficult to accept that it is the will of God that humanity should degrade, deface, desolate, and ultimately perhaps destroy His Creation on Earth. Yet this is the course on which we are embarked.

  Russell E. Train

  Humanity, Environmental, Earth

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• At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and painful moments. Like the ever flowing water of a river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changin cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of the summers and the piercing chill of its winters. But through it all, God walks with us. Never forget that God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Summer, Religious, Dark

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• If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Peace

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• I was aware too how strange adults were, how theirs lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable, shifting sea of dunes.

  Marisha Pessl

  Sea, Adults, Desert

  Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.392, Penguin

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• A modern factory reaches perhaps almost the limit of horror. Everybody in it is constantly harassed and kept on edge by the interference of extraneous wills while the soul is left in cold desolate misery. What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium. Physical labor may be painful, but it is not degrading as such. It is not art; it is not science; it is something else, possessing an exactly equal value with art and science, for it provides an equal opportunity to reach the impersonal stage of attention.

  Simone Weil

  Art, Men, Opportunity

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.17, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• Standing on the Moon looking back at Earth - this lovely place you just came from - you see all the colours, and you know what they represent. Having left the water planet, with all that water brings to Earth in terms of colour and abudance life, the absence of water and atmosphere on the desolate surface of the Moon gives rise to a stark contrast.

  Buzz Aldrin

  Moon, Giving, Water

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• Of all the ruinous and desolate places my uncle had ever beheld, this was the most so. It looked as if it had once been a large house of entertainment; but the roof had fallen in, in many places, and the stairs were steep, rugged, and broken. There was a huge fire-place in the room into which they walked, and the chimney was blackened with smoke; but no warm blaze lighted it up now. The white feathery dust of burnt wood was still strewed over the hearth, but the stove was cold, and all was dark and gloomy.

  Charles Dickens

  Uncles, Heart, Dark

  Charles Dickens (1870). “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”, p.429

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• No one is so accursed by fate, no one so utterly desolate, but some heart though unknown responds unto his own.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Heart, Fate, Destiny

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1849). “The Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ; Complete in One Volume”, p.49

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• We hear often of the distress of the negro servants, on the loss of a kind master; and with good reason, for no creature on God's earth is left more utterly unprotected and desolate than the slave in these circumstances.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Loss, Earth, Kind

  Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Beecher STOWE (2016). “Collected Works (Complete and Illustrated Editions: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Queer Little Folks, The Chimney-Corner, ...)”, p.292, Harriet Beecher Stowe

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• Set about doing good to somebody. Put on your hat and go and visit the sick and poor of your neighborhood; inquire into their circumstances and minister to their wants. Seek out the desolate and afflicted and oppressed. . . I have often tried this method, and have always found it the best medicine for a heavy heart.

  Howard Stern

  Heart, Medicine, Sick

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• Other people may complicate our lives, but life without them would be unbearably desolate. None of us can be truly human in isolation. The qualities that make us human emerge only in the ways we relate to other people.

  Harold S. Kushner

  Teamwork, People, Quality

  Harold S Kushner (2011). “When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough: The Search For a Life That Matters”, p.42, Pan Macmillan

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• The beautiful are never desolate; But some one alway loves them--God or man. If man abandons, God himself takes them.

  Philip James Bailey

  Beauty, Beautiful, Men

  Philip James Bailey (1857). “Festus: a poem”, p.50

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• War wreaked on you his hideous ravishment;
  We, we alone, Nereids inviolate,
  Remain to weep, with the sea-birds to chant:
  Corinth is lost, Corinth is desolate.

  Hilda Doolittle

  War, Loss, Sea

  Hilda Doolittle, Louis L. Martz (1986). “Collected Poems 1912-1944”, p.338, New Directions Publishing

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• Let every Christian be a gardener so that he and she and the whole of creation, which groans in expectation of the Spirit's final harvest, may inherit Paradise. If we Christian's truly treasure the hope that one day we, like Adam and the penitent thief, will walk alongside the One who caused even the dead wood of the Cross to blossom with flowers, then we must also imitate the Master's art and make the desolate earth grow green.

  Vigen Guroian

  Christian, Art, Flower

  Vigen Guroian (2001). “Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening”, p.17, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• The lonely sunsets flare forlorn Down valleys dreadly desolate; The lonely mountains soar in scorn As still as death, as stern as fate.

  Robert W. Service

  Lonely, Sunset, Fate

  Robert William Service, “The Land God Forgot”

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