Meagre Quotes

#1. People with a meagre soul always try to make others feel small too.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#2. Nobody ever forgets their first night in the bush. It's among the precious, meagre handful of life firsts that remain indelible.

A.A. Gill

#3. Criticism is like champagne, nothing more execrable if bad, nothing more excellent if good; if meagre, muddy, vapid and sour, both are fit only to engender colic and wind; but if rich, generous and sparkling, they communicate a genial glow to the spirits, improve the taste, and expand the heart.

Charles Caleb Colton

#4. There should have been a better farewell. But in the end, there never is. And we take what meagre scraps we can find.

Richard K. Morgan

#5. Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.

Henry David Thoreau

#6. The sin was mine; I did not understand. So now is music prisoned in her cave, Save where some ebbing desultory wave Frets with its restless whirls this meagre strand ...

Oscar Wilde

#7. My parents were drawn to the idea that there was space and opportunity in Australia. For the meagre sum of £10, you could sail your entire family out to Australia, so that's what my father chose to do.

Hugh Jackman

#8. Some say no evil thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin, or swart fairy of the mine, Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity.

John Milton

#9. No one can mock your meagre achievements or inability to accomplish the simplest of tasks, if they remain figments of your imagination. You can revel, again and again, in the glory of a fairy tale doomed never to appear in reality.

Chris Murray

#10. We must not forget that all great revolutions and reformations would look mean and meagre if examined in detail as they occurred at the time.

Lydia M. Child

#11. When someone came to ask us for help, it was sacred. We did not even think twice. We helped them, even if we had only meagre means; we offered them arms, a little bit of money, and in occasion, men.

Ahmed Ben Bella

#12. 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 measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.

Lord Kelvin

#13. The meagre lighthouse all in white, haunting the seaboard, as if it were the ghost of an edifice that had once had colour and rotundity, dripped melancholy tears after its late buffeting by the waves.

Charles Dickens

#14. 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

#15. While it is certainly the biographer's business to describe the foibles, passions and idiosyncrasies which make his subject a person, his work will be very meagre if these individual traits are not also seen as part of a universal drama - for each man's life is also the story of Everyman.

Iris Origo

#16. Around the college had grown up in the latter nineteenth century a hap-hazard, ill-blanced collection of professional schools, attended by hard-working meagre creatures with the fun drained out of them...

Yale University

#17. With my meagre knowledge of my own religion i do not want to belong to any religious body

Mahatma Gandhi

#18. Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#19. Writing brings scant relief. It retraces, it delimits. It lends a touch of coherence, the idea of a kind of realism. One stumbles around in a cruel fog, but there is the odd pointer. Chaos is no more than a few feet away. A meagre victory, in truth.

Michel Houellebecq

#20. Slowly, with a look of intense concentration, he got up and advanced on me ... put out a front paw, and stroked my cheek as I used to stoke his chops. A human caress from a cat. I felt very meagre and ill-educated that I could not purr.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

#21. Cold coiled through me, lacing each breath with clouded wisps of frost. There was not so much as a candle lit within the small, single room of my cottage, and delicate crystals of alabaster and beryl rimed my meagre possessions and the barren fireplace. I did not care.

Hazel Butler

#22. What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say, for two thousand years. And then? Why, then, a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for eternity; not the meagre rhetorical eternity of the periodical critics, but for the real eternity wherein dwelleth the Divine.

Thomas Carlyle

#23. There was a young woman named Fleager
Who was terribly, terribly eager
To be all the rage
On the tragedy stage,
Though her talents were pitifully meagre.

Edward Gorey

#24. Love is the only emotion so unexplainable and unique, that not even the greatest of writers could hope to contain it within their meagre words.

Ross Turner

#25. Of all the phantoms fleeting in the mist
Of time, though meagre all and ghostly thin;
Most unsubstantial, unessential shade
Was earthly fame.

Robert Pollok

#26. One composition is meagre, though it has many figures; another is rich, though it has few.

Denis Diderot

#27. The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.

Immanuel Kant

#28. Those who master and apply the secret will reach high stations, accumulate riches, and bargain with life on their own terms, even if their schooling has been meagre.

Napoleon Hill

#29. How meagre one's life becomes when it is reduced to its basic facts. And the last, most complete reduction is on one's tombstone: a name, two dates.

Bill Vaughan

#30. The resources of the Deity cannot be so meagre, that, in order to create a human being endowed with reason, he must change a monkey into a man.

Louis Agassiz