The plants that produce visions can function- for those of us who have inherited the New World Order of barren materialism, cut off from our spiritual heritage by a spiteful culture that gives us nothing but ashes- as the talismans of recognition that awaken our minds to reality.
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.
Our age is bent on trying to make the barren tree of skepticism fruitful by tying the fruits of truth on its branches.
The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory.
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.
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?
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.
There is also purpose in life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.
What shall a man say when a friend has vanished behind the doors of Death? A mere tangle of barren words, only words.
For my part, I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew.
Perhaps I am too tame, too domestic a magician. But how does one work up a little madness? I meet with mad people every day in the street, but I never thought before to wonder how they got mad. Perhaps I should go wandering on lonely moors and barren shores. That is always a popular place for lunatics - in novels and plays at any rate. Perhaps wild England will make me mad.
Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.
How beautiful the yesterday that stood Over me like a rainbow! I am alone, The past is past. I see the future stretch All dark and barren as a rainy sea.
Our fruitless labours mourn, And only rich in barren fame return.
'Tis Liberty that crowns Britannia's isle, and makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile. . . 'Tis Britain's care to watch o'er Europe's fate, and hold in balance each contending state, To threaten bold presumptuous kings with war, and answer her afflicted neighbours' prayer. . . Soon as her fleets appear their terrors cease.
Stercus Accidit. [barren happens]
Ireland is a fruitful mother of genius, but a barren nurse.
The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.
I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.
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.
