“The keenest pangs the wretched find
Are rapture to the dreary void,
The leafless desert of the mind,
The waste of feelings unemployed.”
Source: The Giaour (1813), Line 957.
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George Gordon Byron227
English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement 1788–1824Related quotes
Francesco Berni (1497–1535) Italian poet
Ben è un ramo senza foglia,
Fiume senz' acqua e casa senza via,
La gentilezza senza cortesia.
LXIV, 61
Rifacimento of Orlando Innamorato
James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician
Par une de ces journées sombres qui attristent la fin de l'année, et que rend encore plus mélancoliques le souffle glacé du vent du Nord, écoutez, en lisant Ossian, la fantastique harmonie d'une harpe éolienne balancée au sommet d'un arbre dépouillé de verdure, et vous pourrez éprouver un sentiment profond de tristesse, un désir vague et infini d'une autre existence, un dégoût immense de celle-ci. <br class="br">Hector Berlioz, Mémoires, ch. 39 http://www.hberlioz.com/Writings/HBM39.htm; Eleanor Holmes, Rachel Holmes and Ernest Newman (trans.) Memoirs of Hector Berlioz from 1803 to 1865 (New York: Dover, 1966) pp. 156-7. <br class="br">Criticism
“Obscure they went through dreary shades, that led
Along the waste dominions of the dead.”
Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram,
Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna.
Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book VI, Lines 268–269 (tr. John Dryden)
Anne Brontë book Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), Dreams (1845)
Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica
February, 1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Source: Fire: From A Journal of Love - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath
Gitanjali http://www.spiritualbee.com/gitanjali-poems-of-tagore/ (1912) <br class="br">Context: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high<br>Where knowledge is free<br>Where the world has not been broken up into fragments<br>By narrow domestic walls<br>Where words come out from the depth of truth<br>Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection<br>Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way<br>Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit<br>Where the mind is led forward by thee<br>Into ever-widening thought and action<br>Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
“Like beauteous flowers which vainly waste their scent
Of odours in unhaunted deserts.”
Pharonida (1659), Part II, Book IV.