Desert Quote by Lord Byron

“To salve the pains of consciousness, some people anesthetize themselves with sunny thoughts. But not everyone can follow their lead, above all not those…

— Thomas Ligotti

There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could…

— Edgar Allan Poe

Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them; as in ascending the heights of ambition, which look…

— Oliver Goldsmith

... continual hard labor deadens the energies of the soul, and benumbs the faculties of the mind; the ideas become confined, the mind barren,…

— Maria W. Stewart

“(visions) of strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked with…

— Mary Ann Evans

“He feels a second pang now for the existence of perfection, the stubborn existence of perfection in the most vulnerable of things and in…

— Taiye Selasi

“It might be said that in the sublime feeling, thinking becomes impatient, despairing, disinterested in attaining the ends of freedom by means of nature.”

— Zinzi Clemmons

But it's precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this deliberate burying of yourself underground for forty years out of sheer pain, in…

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this…

— Henry James

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

— George Eliot

God pity us indeed, for we are human, And do not always see, The vision when it comes, the shining change, Or, if we…

— Stephen Vincent Benet

“Darknesse and light divide the course of time, and oblivion snares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember…

— Thomas Browne