Barren Quotes

Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.

All travellers who had preceded me into the Barren Grounds had relied on the abundant game, and in consequence suffered dreadful hardships; in some cases even starved to death.

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

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

I am barren of words. For no sounds from my mouth are worthy of your hearing

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

Ireland is a fruitful mother of genius, but a barren nurse.

The earth, though in comparison of heaven so small, nor glistering, may of solid good contain more plenty than the sun, that barren shines.

The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.

The creator gives no heed to the critic unless he becomes a barren inventor.

The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.

As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.

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

Barren, barren and trivial are these words. But not barren the experience.

Let us be quick to repent of injuries while repentance may not be a barren anguish.

Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?

...by bringing myself over the edge and back, I discovered a passion to live my days fully, a conviction that will sustain me like sweet water on the periodically barren plain of our short lives.

The road to success leads through the valley of humility, and the path is up the ladder of patience and across the wide barren plains of perseverance. As yet, no short cut has ever been discovered.

Lives with no more sense of spiritual meaning than that provided by shopping malls, ordinary television, and stagnant workplaces are barren lives indeed. Spirituality enriches culture.

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

If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not As to thy friends; for when did friendship take A breed for barren metal of his friend?

[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.

Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.

Hatred is a prolific vice; envy, a barren vice.

Alzheimer's ... it is a barren disease, as empty and lifeless as a desert. It is a thief of hearts and souls and memories.

is there not an Arabick Proverb which goes, 'No one throws Stones at a Barren Tree'?

Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme? Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread, By winding myrtle round your ruin'd shed?

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

Sorrows are gardeners: they plant flowers along waste places, and teach vines to cover barren heaps.

Where human life needs most sympathy, where usually it is the most barren, there it is that Christ is more likely to be found than anywhere else.

Scepticism is a barren coast, without a harbor or lighthouse.

An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.

Nothing so hardens the heart of man as a barren familiarity with sacred things.

The Magistrate suffered from the disability of a free-thinking turn of mind and from a life that was barren and dreary to match.

From plots and treasons Heaven preserve my years, But save me most from my petitioners. Unsatiate as the barren womb or grave; God cannot grant so much as they can crave.

By the deficiency or absence of one necessary constituent, all the others being present, the soil is rendered barren for all those crops to the life of which that one constituent is indispensable.

Stercus Accidit. [barren happens]

Without art, we're handicapped, and living a stifled, barren existence.

his eyes took in the barren slopes and the scattered boulders and the lonley gray road windingits way into the fading hills,and i could feel him thinking to himself this is no place to die

I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, 'Tis all barren--and so it is; and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers.

Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock.

Isaiah calls the Church barren because her children are born without effort by the Word of faith through the Spirit of God. It is a matter of birth, not of exertion.

God knows just the place where you'll be placed. He has a barren living room in desperate need of warmth and joy. A corner of the world needs some color. He selected you with that place in mind.

All I wanted, even when I hated you most, was some poor, barren, parched excuse to love you. But you only gave me riddles.

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

We need to ensure that children are not forced to waste their time on barren rubbish.

When a golden girl can win Prayer from out the lips of sin, When the barren almond bears, And a little child gives away its tears, Then shall all the house be still And peace come to Canterville.

Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of Nature re-forms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.

What shall a man say when a friend has vanished behind the doors of Death? A mere tangle of barren words, only words.

The high mountains are barren, but the low valleys are covered over with corn; and accordingly the showers of God's grace fall into lowly hearts and humble souls.