Vain Quotes
To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal.
Immanuel Kant
If a man's esteem and gratitude are ever worth the winning, you have won mine today. If ever the future should bring to you a time when you need a man's help, believe me, you will not call in vain. God grant that no such time may ever come to you to break the sunshine of your life; but if it should ever come, promise me that you will let me know.
Bram Stoker
Of all the kind of pains, the greatest pain is to love and to love in vain.
George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne
The hills are reared, the seas are scooped in vain If learning's altar vanish from the plain.
William Ellery Channing
First of all a natural talent is required; for when Nature opposes, everything else is in vain; but when Nature leads the way to what is most excellent, instruction in the art takes place.
Hippocrates
A word of kindness is seldom spoken in vain, while witty sayings are as easily lost as the pearls slipping from a broken string.
George Dennison Prentice
It is in vain that we search for an essential difference between good and evil, for their constituents are the same. The crucial distinction lies in their structure, i.e., the manner in which the pieces are assembled. Evil is disintegration, an angry juxtaposition of alienated opposites, with parts always striving to repress other parts. Good is the synthesis and reconciliation of these same pieces.
Charles Hampden-Turner
I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,Sniff them and think and sniff again and tryOnce more to think what it is I am remembering,Always in vain. I cannot like the scent,Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,With no meaning, than this bitter one.
Edward Thomas
Sweet is true love that is given in vain, and sweet is death that takes away pain.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
People have fought in vain about the names and lives of their saviors, and have named their religions after the name of their savior, instead of uniting with each other in the truth that is taught.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
Is it that they think it a duty to be continually talking,' pursued she: 'and so never pause to think, but fill up with aimless trifles and vain repetitions when subjects of real interest fail to present themselves? - or do they really take a pleasure in such discourse?' 'Very likely they do,' said I; 'their shallow minds can hold no great ideas, and their light heads are carried away by trivialities that would not move a better-furnished skull; - and their only alternative to such discourse is to plunge over head and ears into the slough of scandal - which is their chief delight.
Anne Bronte
Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.
Helen Keller
It was a place to bless God in and cease from vain words.
Elizabeth von Arnim
Poverty, labor, and calamity are not without their luxuries, which the rich, the indolent, and the fortunate in vain seek for.
William Hazlitt
He has been waiting for us, waiting in vain, and His fatherly heart was filled with grief. When He then sought to call us home through chastenings, we rebelled against Him and His actions and again refused to come home to the Father. What else should He do with us?
Basilea Schlink
