Meagre Quotes
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Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always
something thinner, barer, more meagre.
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More Meagre Quotes
One composition is meagre, though it has many figures; another is rich, though it has few.
Denis Diderot— 1776-81 Pense es de tache e s sur la peinture.
Tawny are the leaves turned but they still hold, And it is harvest; what shall this land produce? A meagre hill of kernels, a runnel of juice; Declension looks from our land, it is old. Therefore let us assemble, dry, gray, spare, And mild as yellow air.
john crowe ransom— 1924 Chills and Fever,'Antique Harvesters'.
I had, in my legal practice, often encountered really shocking examples of the devastating impact of the costs of long-term medical care on meagre incomes. And, just before I was elected, I had my own personal experience in paying very considerable bills for my mother's terminal illness.
judy lamarsh— CHAPTER 6, The crisis of Confederation, p. 120-121
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science , whatever the matter may be.
william thomson— Lecture on "Electrical Units of Measurement" (3 May 1883), published in Popular Lectures Vol. I, p. 73
Thou should'st be carolling thy Maker's praise, Poor bird! now fetter'd, and here set to draw, With graceless toil of beak and added claw, The meagre food that scarce thy want allays! And this to gratify the gloating gaze Of fools, who value Nature not a straw, But know to prize the infraction of her law And hard perversion of her creatures' ways! Thee the wild woods await, in leaves attired, Where notes of liquid utterance should engage Thy bill, that now with pain scant forage earns.
— Julian Fane, Poems, Second Edition, with Additional Poems, To a Canary Bird; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 89.
