Barren Quotes - Page 8

• Our science, so called, is always more barren and mixed with error than our sympathies.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Science, Errors, Accounts

  Henry David Thoreau (1999). “Material Faith: Thoreau on Science”, p.95, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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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• A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. A fop of fields is no better than his brother on Broadway.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Brother, Broadway, Fields

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1870). “The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.509, Рипол Классик

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• There are two kinds of paradoxes. They are not so much the good and the bad, nor even the true and the false. Rather they are the fruitful and the barren; the paradoxes which produce life and the paradoxes that merely announce death. Nearly all modern paradoxes merely announce death.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Two, Kind, Paradox

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• If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without knowing or feeling it, this apparent barren affort has brought more light into the soul.

  Simone Weil

  Light, Knowing, Soul

  Simone Weil (2009). “Waiting on God (Routledge Revivals)”, p.32, Routledge

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• The apparition of an evil, sick unconscious wild city rose before me in visible semblance, and about the dead buildings in the barren air, the bodies of the soul that built the wonderland shuffled and stalked and stalked and lurched in attitudes of immemorial nightmare all around.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Attitude, Air, Cities

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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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• [The Goths'] poverty was incurable; since the most liberal donatives were soon dissipated in wasteful luxury, and the most fertile estates became barren in their hands.

  Edward Gibbon

  Hands, Luxury, Poverty

  Edward Gibbon (1820). “The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire”, p.8

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• Grace has uprooted us from a barren wilderness of sin and transplanted us by streams of living water.

  Steven J Lawson

  Water, Grace, Sin

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• The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.

  C. S. Lewis

  Simple, Sound, Realizing

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.215, Simon and Schuster

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• You never tire of the moor. You cannot think the wonderful secrets which it contains. It is so vast, and so barren, and so mysterious.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Thinking, Secret, Mysterious

  Arthur Conan Doyle (2013). “The Complete Sherlock Holmes”, p.538, Race Point Publishing

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• People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.

  Eric Hoffer

  Responsibility, Insecure, Self

  ERIC HOFFER (1963). “THE TRUE BELIEVER”

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• My life is like a faded leaf,
  My harvest dwindled to a husk:
  Truly my life is void and brief
  And tedious in the barren dusk;
  My life is like a frozen thing,
  No bud nor greenness can I see:
  Yet rise it shall - the sap of Spring;
  O Jesus, rise in me.

  Christina Rossetti

  Jesus, Spring, Life Is Like

  Christina Rossetti, C.H. Sisson (2014). “Selected Poems”, p.64, Routledge

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• Or thou might'st better listen to the wind, Whose language is to thee a barren noise, Though it blows legend-laden through the trees.

  John Keats

  Blow, Wind, Tree

  John Keats (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of John Keats (Illustrated)”, p.422, Delphi Classics

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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