Alas! our young affections run to waste,

Or water but the desert.

Lord Byron 1788-1824: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Canto iv. Stanza 120.

Haste maketh waste.

John Heywood (Circa 1565): Proverbes. Part i. Chap. ii.

In the desert a fountain is springing,

In the wide waste there still is a tree,

And a bird in the solitude singing,

Which speaks to my spirit of thee.

Lord Byron 1788-1824: Stanzas to Augusta.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear;

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Thomas Gray (1716-1771): Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Stanza 14.

Full little knowest thou that hast not tride,

What hell it is in suing long to bide:

To loose good dayes, that might be better spent;

To wast long nights in pensive discontent;

To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;

To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow.

  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares;

To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires;

To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne,

To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne.

Unhappie wight, borne to desastrous end,

That doth his life in so long tendance spend!

Edmund Spenser (1553-1599): Mother Hubberds Tale. Line 895.

Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste.

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878): Thanatopsis.

The keenest pangs the wretched find

Are rapture to the dreary void,

The leafless desert of the mind,

The waste of feelings unemployed.

Lord Byron 1788-1824: The Giaour. Line 957.

Alone!—that worn-out word,

So idly spoken, and so coldly heard;

Yet all that poets sing and grief hath known

Of hopes laid waste, knells in that word Alone!

Edward Bulwer Lytton (1805-1873): The New Timon. (1846.) Part ii.

Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,

And nought is everything and everything is nought.

Horace Smith (1779-1849): Rejected Addresses. Cui Bono?

Thyself and thy belongings

Are not thine own so proper as to waste

Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee.

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,

Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues

Did not go forth of us, 't were all alike

As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch'd

But to fine issues, nor Nature never lends

The smallest scruple of her excellence

But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines

Herself the glory of a creditor,

Both thanks and use.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Measure for Measure. Act i. Sc. 1.