Vain Quotes
Kindness is the evidence of greatness. If anyone is glad that you are here, then you have not lived in vain.
Charles Fenno Hoffman
A vain man is a nauseous creature: he is so full of himself that he has no room for anything else, be it never so good or deserving.
William Penn
We waste our lights in vain, like lamps by day.
William Shakespeare
It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.
Willa Cather
Discourses on humility are a source of pride in the vain and of humility in the humble.
Blaise Pascal
Not so in haste, my heart! Have faith in God and wait; Although he linger long, He never comes too late. He never comes too late, He knoweth what is best: Vex not thyself in vain; Until he cometh, rest. Until he cometh, rest. Nor grudge the hours that roll: The feet that wait for God Are soonest at the goal. Are soonest at the goal. That is not gained by speed; Then hold thee still, my heart, For I shall wait his lead.
Bradford Torrey
We conceal it from ourselves in vain - we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.
Blaise Pascal
We are so presumptuous that we wish to be known to all the world, even to those who come after us; and we are so vain that the esteem of five or six persons immediately around us is enough to amuse and satisfy us.
Blaise Pascal
I've always admired people with really strong presences and felt that caring about the visual component of what you do is not intrinsically superficial or vain.
Douglas Glenn Colvin
Ramones
The labour of digging
and watering, the anxious zeal with which I
pounced on weeds, the poring over gardening
books, the plans made as I sat on the little seat
in the middle gazing admiringly and with the
eye of faith on the trim surface so soon to be
gemmed with a thousand flowers, the reckless
expenditure of pfennings^ the humiliation of my
position in regard to Fraulein Wundermacher,
all, all had been in vain.
Elizabeth von Arnim
... because real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.
Bohumil Hrabal
Why, all delights are vain; but that most vain, Which, with pain purchas'd, doth inherit pain.
William Shakespeare
Of what use are the great number of petrifactions, of different species, shape and form which are dug up by naturalists? Perhaps the collection of such specimens is sheer vanity and inquisitiveness. I do not presume to say; but we find in our mountains the rarest animals, shells, mussels, and corals embalmed in stone, as it were, living specimens of which are now being sought in vain throughout Europe. These stones alone whisper in the midst of general silence.
Carl Linnaeus
There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present.
Blaise Pascal
Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The artist is an interpreter of Nature. People learn to love Nature through pictures. To the artist, nothing is in vain; nothing beneath his notice. If he is great enough, he will exalt every subject which he treats.
William Morris Hunt
All we had was her room, her stories, and the quiet that settled in as we tried in vain to spread ourselves out and fill the space she'd left behind.
Sarah Dessen
Whoever, in the pursuit of science, seeks after immediate practical utility, may generally rest assured that he will seek in vain.
Hermann von Helmholtz
You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell. What I mean is that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me.
Charles Dickens
We are so vain as to set the highest value upon those things to which nature has assigned the lowest place. What can be more coarse and rude in the mind than the precious metals, or more slavish and dirty than the people that dig and work them? And yet they defile our minds more than our bodies, and make the possessor fouler than the artificer of them. Rich men, in fine, are only the greater slaves.
Seneca the Younger
Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years!I am so weary of toil and of tears,-Toil without recompense, tears all in vain!Take them, and give me my childhood again!
Elizabeth Chase Allen
Let not one single life have passed in vain. What really matters is who you love and how you love.
Oprah Winfrey
