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

“This book is written in a barren period of loss with an attempt to move forward towards substance.”

— Phindiwe Nkosi

Virtue is as little to be acquired by learning as genius; nay, the idea is barren, and is only to be employed as an…

— Arthur Schopenhauer

I stayed in L.A. long enough to get on my feet, and then I moved back to New York. The reason I moved here…

— Iggy Pop

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

T is liberty crowns Britannia's Isle, And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile.

— Joseph Addison

My icons do not raise up the blessed savior in elaborate cathedrals. They are constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring a limited light.

— Dan Flavin

“Just when normal life felt almost possible--when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (prismatic spray of light through an icicle;…

— David Wroblewski

The apparition of an evil, sick unconscious wild city rose before me in visible semblance, and about the dead buildings in the barren air,…

— Allen Ginsberg

Please don't settle for happiness. It's not good enough. Of course you deserve it, but if that's all you have in mind - happiness…

— Toni Morrison

All men who live only according to their five senses, and seek nothing beyond the gratification of their natural appetites for pleasure and reputation…

— Thomas Merton

I find the aesthetics of the 20th century hopelessly barren.

— Twyla Tharp

Perseverance gives power to weakness, and opens to poverty the world's wealth. It spreads fertility over the barren landscape, and buds the choicest flowers…

— Samuel Griswold Goodrich

“Life without love is nothing but a barren piece of land.”

— Dr. Ashok Anand

Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges;Thou art fed with perpetual breath, and alive after infinite changes,And fresh from the kisses of death,Of…

— Algernon Charles Swinburne

By the deficiency or absence of one necessary constituent, all the others being present, the soil is rendered barren for all those crops to…

— Justus von Liebig