Empty Chamber

Famous quotes containing the words empty chamber, empty and/or chamber:

    Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,—not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,—and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    With empty hands we come; empty handed we go.
    Chinese proverb.

    Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire,—
    Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire,
    Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves,—
    Cells for the passionate pleasure of prayer to the soul that grieves,
    Pure with a sense of the passing of saints through the wood,
    Cool for the dutiful weighing of ill with good;—
    Sidney Lanier (1842–1881)