Top 100 All In Vain Quotes
#1. All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel - although he neither saw nor heard - to feel the presence of my head within the room.
Edgar Allan Poe
#2. Love is rebellious bird that nobody can tame, and it's all in vain to call it if it chooses to refuse.
Georges Bizet
#3. Christ could be born a thousand times in Galilee - but all in vain until He is born in me.
Angelus Silesius
#4. It is all in vain; the torture of the unfulfilled law cannot be overcome.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#5. 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
#6. Our society holds to youthfulness with a white-knuckled grip. Ultimately it's all in vain. But the gospel promises us eternal youthfulness in God's presence.
Randy Alcorn
#7. Tis all in vain to keep a constant pother
About one vice and fall into another.
Alexander Pope
#8. I cannot drug my life with the present moment;
The present moment may rape
but all in vain
The future, for the future remains a virgin
Who must be tried again.
Louis MacNeice
#9. Too high an appreciation of our own talents is the chief cause why experience preaches to us all in vain.
Charles Caleb Colton
#10. It is all in vain; you cannot give money to some members of the community but by taking it from others. If you desire to ruin the tax-payer, you may do so. But at least do not banter him by saying: In order to compensate your losses, I take from you again as much as I have taken from you already.
Frederic Bastiat
#11. It is in vain to hope to please all alike. Let a man stand with his face in what direction he will, he must necessarily turn his back on one half of the world.
George Dennison Prentice
#12. The sexiest people are thinkers. Nobody's interested in somebody who's just vain with a hole in their head, talking about the latest thing - there is no latest thing. It's all rubbish.
Vivienne Westwood
#13. Whether we athletes liked it or not, the 4-minute mile had become rather like an Everest: a challenge to the human spirit, it was a barrier that seemed to defy all attempts to break it, an irksome reminder that men's striving might be in vain.
Roger Bannister
#14. A mighty pain to love it is,
And 't is a pain that pain to miss;
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.
Abraham Cowley
#15. He who has learned to look to God in everything he does is at the same time diverted from all vain thoughts.
John Calvin
#16. Many have a vague idea that they must make some wonderful effort in order to gain the favor of God. But all self-dependence is vain. It is only by connecting with Jesus through faith that the sinner becomes a hopeful, believing child of God.
Ellen G. White
#17. Sometimes Robert believed one thing and sometimes the other, and he wondered if that was true of all those who loved too much and in vain.
Jeane Westin
#18. All Juleps are made for present use, and therefore it is in vain to speak of their duration.
Nicholas Culpeper
#19. What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it, you become its prey
William Gaddis
#20. Some change imperceptibly, little by little, others quickly and once and for all, but everyone changes, and for that reason it is in vain to ask whose fate is the best. My
Leena Krohn
#21. We ought to punish pitilessly that shameful pretence of friendly intercourse. I like a man to be a man, and to show on all occasions the bottom of his heart in his discourse. Let that be the thing to speak, and never let our feelings be beneath vain compliments
Moliere
#22. Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms.
Horace Mann
#23. I think it's really rare to see women on television who are brilliant, selfish, vain, fallible - and I feel like I have all those capacities in myself, so it's good to see people in the media representing all of those things.
Kerry Bishe
#24. O that one unguarded moment! / Were it mine to live again, / All the strength of its temptation / Would appeal to me in vain.
Phoebe Cary
#25. All life is in vain, for Death makes a nonsense of pain.
Gasmaskman
#26. There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul. Horrible as successful artists often are, there is nothing crueler or more vain than a failed artist.
Erica Jong
#27. Do you know that there's hardly anyone left of last year's Caucasian governments? I've tried to stop it, but in vain. Yet they can't all be Trotskyites and traitors.
Lavrentiy Beria
#28. One honest John Tompkins, a hedger & ditcher,
Although he was poor, did not want to be richer;
For all such vain wishes in him were prevented
By a fortunate habit of being contented.
Jane Taylor
#29. Forbid it Lord that I should boast, save in the death of Christ, my God: All the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them to his blood.
Isaac Watts
#30. 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
#31. All outward means of grace, if separate from the spirit of God, cannot profit, or conduce, in any degree, either to the knowledge or love of God. All outward things, unless he work in them and by them, are in vain.
John Wesley
#32. I don't want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death!
Anne Frank
#33. Unless you come out of your mind and become a no-mind you will not know what life is all about, you will live in vain. You will not have your honeymoon, it is impossible. You will not know the sweetness that existence is full of and the ecstasy.
Rajneesh
#35. All your scholarship would be in vain if at the same time you do not build your character and attain mastery over your thoughts and your actions.
Mahatma Gandhi
#36. 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
#37. Because, in the end, without love all our effort is wasted, all we do is in vain.
Rick Yancey
#38. ...it is very well worth while to be tormented for two or three years of one's life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. Consider - if reading had not been taught, Mrs. Radcliffe would have written in vain - or perhaps might not have written at all.
Jane Austen
#39. How vain painting is-we admire the realistic depiction of objects which in their original state we don't admire at all.
Blaise Pascal
#40. ...I stand looking at the aircraft, trying in vain to remember all the theoretical lore which i was supposed to have absorbed in school. The effort is discouraging.
Ernest K. Gann
#41. He that taketh his own cares upon himself loads himself in vain with an uneasy burden. I will cast all my cares on God; He hath bidden me; they cannot burden Him.
Joseph Hall
#42. There's an angel that's watching right over you All your trials have not been in vain Won't you lift your head up to the starry night Finding strength in the things that remain.
Van Morrison
#43. And although thus short, we shorten many ways,
Living so little while we are alive;
In eating, drinking, sleeping, vain delight
So unawares comes on perpetual night,
And puts all pleasures vain unto eternal flight.
Anne Bradstreet
#44. A battle that you win cancels any other bad action of yours. In the same way, by losing one, all the good things worked by you before become vain.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#45. As Christmas approaches remember all that you have experienced - has not been in vain.
Eleesha
#46. Those moments when once and for all a man shows his worth and that his whole past has not been in vain but has been a preparation for those moments.
Leo Tolstoy
#47. But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.
Marcel Proust
#48. All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.
George Bernard Shaw
#49. Ah, cruel 'tis to love, And cruel not to love, But cruelest of all To love and love in vain.
Anacreon
#50. All's fair in love and war'. I could hear the vain grin on his lip as he recited the idiom.
Nely Cab
#51. All our efforts to attain immortality-by statesmanship, by conquest, by science or the arts-are equally vain in the long run, because the long run is longer than any of us can imagine.
Sydney J. Harris
#52. All of them. Fated to love in vain.
Anne Rouen
#53. He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.
Edith Wharton
#54. Vain indeed is all overweening pride in the conquest even of the entire universe if one has not conquered one's own passions.
Sri Aurobindo
#55. Hence, all you vain delights, As short as are the nights Wherein you spend your folly! There's naught in this life sweet But only melancholy; O sweetest melancholy!
John Fletcher
#56. My cruel fate hath warr'd with me in vain
Life, glory, worth, and all unmeasur'd skill
Beauty and grace, themselves in me fulfill
That many I surpass, and to the best attain.
Benvenuto Cellini
#57. If there be ground for you to trust in your own righteousness, then, all that Christ did to purchase salvation, and all that God did to prepare the way for it is in vain.
Jonathan Edwards
#58. A hopeless exile from his native home, From death alone exempt - but cease to mourn; Let all combine to achieve his wish'd return; Neptune atoned, his wrath shall now refrain, Or thwart the synod of the gods in vain.
Homer
#59. I looked about for some of my acquaintance, but in vain, for I saw not one person that I knew, which is very odd, for all the world seemed there.
Fanny Burney
#60. As we maintain the vigil of peace, we must remember that justice is a vigil, too-a vigil we must keep in our own streets and schools and among the lives of all our people-so that those
who died here on their native soil shall not have died in vain.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#61. He who has waited long enough, will wait forever. And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.
Samuel Beckett
#62. Anything you do to help better humanity is never a waste of time~Nor is done in vain! Keep your work up...keep moving forward! Your beaming lights will always help make things brighter for all!
Timothy Pina
#63. The skeptic has no illusions about life, nor a vain belief in the promise of immortality. Since this life here and now is all we can know, our most reasonable option is to live it fully.
Paul Kurtz
#64. An exile from home splendour dazzles in vain,Oh give me my lowly thatched cottage again;The birds singing gayly, that came at my call,Give me them, and that peace of mind dearer than all.
John Howard Payne
#65. Above all, the earth is moving in a void. All efforts of man to improve it are a vain endeavour.
Sibaprasad Dutta
#66. In pageants, you are evaluated from head to toe and it's obviously all about looks, and as vain as that is, they can also bring you lots of opportunities to do amazing things.
Katherine Webb
#67. I'll find a day to massacre them all
And raze their faction and their family,
The cruel father and his traitorous sons,
To whom I sued for my dear son's life,
And make them know what 'tis to let a queen
Kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain.
William Shakespeare
#68. All we ask you to do is submit to it, and, if you scream or moan, to agree ahead of time that it will be in vain,
Pauline Reage
#69. As a man may be eating all day, and for want of digestion is never nourished, so these endless readers may cram themselves in vain with intellectual food.
Isaac Watts
#70. All attempts, then, for mortification of any lust, without an interest in Christ, are vain.
John Owen
#71. All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated.
Kofi Annan
#72. Solitude helps the mind to see itself clearly as in a mirror, and to free itself from the vain endeavor of ambition with all its complexities, fears, and frustrations, which are the outcome of self-centered activity.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#73. First, since by God's command all the saints daily ask for their sins to be forgiven (Matt.6:12), they confess themselves sinners. They do not ask in vain, for the Lord Jesus never bade us ask for something which he would not give us.
John Calvin
#74. So the restless traveler long at last for his native soil, finds his cottage in the arms of his wife, in the affection of his children, labor necessary for their support, all the happiness which he sought in vain the wild world
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#75. It may easily come to pass that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance.
Baruch Spinoza
#76. This is that rest this vain world lends,
To end in death that all things ends.
Samuel Daniel
#77. The War was decided in the first twenty days of fighting, and all that happened afterwards consisted in battles which, however formidable and devastating, were but desperate and vain appeals against the decision of Fate.
Winston S. Churchill
#78. I just hope I don't have to explain all the times I've used His name in vain when I get up there.
Bob Hope
#79. Let us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#80. How sad that youth, with all its power,
Was given us in vain, to burn;
That we betrayed it every hour,
And were deceived by it in turn;
Ivan Turgenev
#81. We are all blind until we see That in the human plan Nothing is worth the making If it does not make the man. Why build these cities glorious If man unbuilded goes? We build the world in vain Unless the builders also grow.
Edwin Markham
#82. Line in nature is not found;
Unit and universe are round;
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#83. As love is full of unbefitting strains,
All wanton as a child, skipping and vain,
Form'd by the eye and therefore, like the eye,
Full of strange shapes, of habits and of forms,
Varying in subjects as the eye doth roll
To every varied object in his glance
William Shakespeare
#84. [ ... ] But then,
What is not vain, by God, in lives of men?
All is in vain! We play at blind man's buff
Until hard edges break into out path.
Man life's is error. Where, then, is relief?
In shedding tears or wrestling down my grief?
Jan Kochanowski
#85. Pride of one's work is not improper, unladylike, or vain. We can all take a lesson from the sea turtle. She does not travel thousands of miles or risk all for her ego. She has an instinct for greatness
one that I believe is found in all living creatures.
Mary Alice
#86. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.
H.G.Wells
#87. For all the failures of naval, air and army defense, the men who died at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines would not die in vain.
Nigel Hamilton
#88. What, start at this! when sixty years have spread. Their grey experience o'er thy hoary head? Is this the all observing age could gain? Or hast thou known the world so long in vain?
John Dryden
#89. You spend your whole life believing that you will always be on the outside or on the borderline. You struggle and struggle, and yet it all seems to be in vain. And then, suddenly, you are allowed inside and lifted up into the light.
Peter Hoeg
#90. Words? I tell you not to write me letters; I command you. Is it not enough to want you so in vain, but you send me what evokes you here before me
this paper, all along whose lines your hand has lain?
Anne Reeve Aldrich
#91. This is the moment too many couples struggle in vain to avoid or ignore - even to the point of choosing bitter divorce and fractured family over the daunting task of confronting the sky together, with all the "confident girders" behind them in the past.
Christopher Ryan
#92. All men are selfish, but the vain man is in love with himself. He admires, like the lover his adored one, everything which to others is indifferent.
Berthold Auerbach
#93. Who ever planted an iroko tree - the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with greatness in men.
Chinua Achebe
#94. Marshalsea and all its blighted fruits. They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted
Charles Dickens
#95. It is the minority that has stood in the vain of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world.
John Bartholomew Gough
#96. Kitsch parodies catharsis ... It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts ...
Theodor Adorno
#97. Excess in apparel is another costly folly. The very trimming of the vain world would clothe all the naked ones.
William Penn
#98. In vain a zealous evangelist with a fely hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: 'God is great and good. Come unto Him.' On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God.
Albert Camus
#99. What is there in thee, Man, that can be known?
Dark fluxion, all unfixable by thought,
A phantom dim of past and future wrought,
Vain sister of the worm ...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#100. Nothing that we do, is done in vain. I believe, with all my soul, that we shall see triumph.
Charles Dickens
