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Literary note (auto-generated)

The term “destitute” has been employed in literature with a remarkable versatility, used not only to describe deprivation of material necessities but also to evoke an absence of intangible qualities. In some works, authors depict characters or settings as “destitute of hope” or “destitute of principle,” highlighting internal or moral voids ([1], [2], [3]), while in others it describes physical barrenness—as in rooms lacking furnishings or landscapes void of natural elements ([4], [5], [6]). Cicero and other writers extend this notion to abstract realms, critiquing deficiences in learning, pleasure, or even divine attributes ([7], [8], [9]). Moreover, the word appears in contexts ranging from the satirical portrayal of societal conditions ([10], [11]) to scientific observations about living beings and nature ([12], [13]). Overall, “destitute” serves as a potent descriptor that encapsulates the absence of something essential, whether that be physical objects, emotional support, or ethical substance.
  1. Our Schopenhauer was such a Dürerian knight: he was destitute of all hope, but he sought the truth.
    — from The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
  2. ‘It means destitute of principle, and prone to every vice that is common to youth.’
    — from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
  3. I wish to soothe him; yet can I counsel one so infinitely miserable, so destitute of every hope of consolation, to live?
    — from Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
  4. The room was destitute of carpet or of curtain.
    — from American Notes by Charles Dickens
  5. An iron-bound door led into an adjoining cell, or vault, wholly destitute of windows, or any means of admitting light.
    — from Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
  6. It was not quite destitute of furniture.
    — from The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens
  7. What I am now showing is, that your Gods are destitute of pleasure; and therefore, according to your own manner of reasoning, they are not happy.
    — from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations by Marcus Tullius Cicero
  8. In the mean while, Velleius, let me entreat you not to be always saying that we are utterly destitute of every sort of learning.
    — from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations by Marcus Tullius Cicero
  9. Fear is, therefore, caution destitute of reason.
    — from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations by Marcus Tullius Cicero
  10. Destitute-of-Breeches: a mournful Destitution; which however, if Twenty millions share it, may become more effective than most Possessions!
    — from The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle
  11. The destitute orange-girl, the neglected washerwoman, the distressed muffin-man find in her a fast and generous friend.
    — from Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
  12. The direct production of images in space is equally instantaneous, because these images are only light substances destitute of depth.
    — from The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius
  13. They have divided hoofs, and are destitute of front teeth in the upper jaw.
    — from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin

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