Dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance. [ William Shakespeare ]

This barren verbiage current among men.
Light coin, the tinsel clink of compliment. [ Tennyson ]

Great minds, like Heaven, are pleased in doing good,
Though the ungrateful subjects of their favours
Are barren in return. [ Rowe ]

Wise sayings often fall on barren ground; but a kind word is never thrown away. [ Arthur Helps ]

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

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

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

Revenge is barren of itself; itself is the dreadful food it feeds on; its delight is murder, and its saiety, despair. [ Schiller ]

Nothing can we call our own but death, and that small model of the barren earth which serves as paste and cover to our bones. [ William Shakespeare ]

In goodness, rich men should transcend the poor, as clouds the earth; raised by the comfort of the sun to water dry and barren grounds. [ Tourneur ]

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. [ Sir J. Reynolds ]

It may be remarked for the comfort of honest poverty that avarice reigns most in those who have but few good qualities to recommend them. This is a weed that will grow in a barren soil. [ Hughes ]

The avaricious man is like the barren sandy ground of the desert, which sucks in all the rain and dews with greediness, but yields no fruitful herbs or plants for the benefit of others. [ Zeno ]

Observation made in the cloister or in the desert will generally be as obscure as the one and as barren as the other; but he that would paint with his pencil must study originals, and not be over-fearful of a little dust. [ Colton ]

O poets! what injury you have done us, and how right Plato was to banish you from his republic! How your ambrosia has rendered more bitter our absinth! How have we found our lives more barren and more desolate, after having turned our eyes toward the sublime perspectives which your dreams have opened in the infinite! [ T. Gautier ]