Top 100 Quotes About Vain
#1. And all knowledge is vain save when there is work, and all work is empty save when there is love; and when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God.
Kahlil Gibran
#2. He destroys that he might build; for when He is about to rear His sacred temple in us, He first totally razes that vain and pompous edifice, which human art and power had erected, and from its horrible ruins a new structure is formed, by His power only.
Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon
#3. 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
#4. Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.
Bernard Malamud
#5. Opinion is a light, vain, crude, and imperfect thing.
Ben Jonson
#6. Look within.
Within you is the hidden God.
Within you is the immortal soul.
Within you is the inexhaustible spiritual treasure.
Within you is the ocean of bliss.
Look within for the happiness which you have sought in vain.
Sivananda
#7. I am now the site of an unmistakable sag ... With fancy holographic belt buckles do I attempt to restrain my stampeding softness. In vain ... My only virtues, as a physical specimen, are my sideburns, which are like the pelts of rare woodland animals. My sideburns are not to be ignored.
Rick Moody
#8. I'm vain. My arms are thin, but I'm vain about loose flesh. And so I'm careful that what I wear will show off my best parts, which are my waist and my butt.
Jane Fonda
#9. I'm before him on my knees, and he kisses me He assumes I lose my reason and I do. Men are stupid, men are vain, Love's disgusting, love's insane, A humiliating business-oh how true.
Stephen Sondheim
#11. The city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of feeling guilt; a dream pursued, and found vain, wanting, and destructive.
Jonathan Raban
#12. A politics of vengeance is not politics. Revenge is a recklessness towards the future in a vain attempt to make the present abolish a suffering which is already past.
Bernard Crick
#14. 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
#15. The foolish families worry over blood. I care nothing for purity of family or ancestry. That is a vain thing. I care only for strength. What a man can do to other men, women.
Pierce Brown
#16. 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
#17. It is vain to keep a secret from one who has a right to know it. It will tell itself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#18. 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
#19. A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the lord in vain- then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system?
Robert A. Heinlein
#20. He that first likened glory to a shadow did better than he was aware of. They are both of them things excellently vain. Glory also, like a shadow, goes sometimes before the body, and sometimes in length infinitely exceeds it.
Michel De Montaigne
#21. Vain is the word of that philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man.
Epicurus
#22. Empty hands held high
such a small sacrifice
if not joined with my life, i sing in vain tonight
may the words i say, and the things i do
make my lifesong sing to you
Let my lifesong sing to you ...
Casting Crowns
#23. It is vain for you to expect, it is impudent for you to ask of God forgiveness on your own behalf, if you refuse to exercise this forgiving temper with respect to others.
Benjamin Hoadly
#24. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.
Anonymous
#25. No reliance can be placed on the friendship of kings, nor vain hope put in the melodious voice of boys; for that passes away like a vision, and this vanishes like a dream.
Saadi
#26. He who has learned to look to God in everything he does is at the same time diverted from all vain thoughts.
John Calvin
#28. The whole of reality was just a vain attempt to imitate the world of words.
Amos Oz
#29. A modest man is steady, an humble man timid, and a vain one presumptuous.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#30. Was never true love loved in vain, For truest love is highest gain.
George Eliot
#31. 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
#32. If you live in a society like ours, in which people seldom object if they hear someone taking the Lord's name in vain but are outraged if they see a pregnant woman smoking, then you are living in a world that values the worldly more than the divine.
David Brooks
#33. Live for yourself and you will live in vain;
Live for others, and you will live again.
Bob Marley
#34. These are big trade-offs for a simple piece of cake - add five hundred calories, subtract well-being, allure, and self-esteem - and the feelings behind them are anything but vain or shallow.
Caroline Knapp
#35. 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
#36. Contact lenses are for vain, weak-willed piglets who swan around showing off: 'Look everybody, I can see without spectacles. No one at first glance will ever assume I know how to surf the net.'
Greg Proops
#37. Readers have the power that professors pretend they wield. Millions of words of professorial contempt have failed to kill Kipling. Praising Shaw to the skies has been vain.
Gene Wolfe
#38. All Juleps are made for present use, and therefore it is in vain to speak of their duration.
Nicholas Culpeper
#39. Many sweat to reconcile St Paul and St James, but in vain. 'Faith justifies' and 'faith does not justify' contradict each other flatly. If any one can harmonize them I will give him my doctor's hood and let him call me a fool.
Martin Luther
#40. Never had she so honestly felt that she could have loved him, as now, when all love must be vain.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#41. 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
#42. Beware of singing divine psalms for an ordinary recreation, as do men of impure spirits, who sing holy psalms intermingled with profane ballads: They are God's word: take them not in thy mouth in vain.
Lewis Bayly
#43. 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
#44. Grace is false, and beauty is vain. A woman who fears God - she is praised. Give to her of the fruit of her hands, and her deeds will praise her at the gates.
Jonathan Kellerman
#45. How foolish it is to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence.
Hermann Hesse
#46. 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
#47. Mavis' bear sailed through the air in Cassie's room, falling onto the bed. 'What's he in aid of?' 'He's reconnaissance expert. He wouldn't hear of me enterin' potential hostile ground without testin' for fire. Has his sacrifice been in vain?
Christine M. Knight
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Such is the passing that you must leave,
All men must die, and it is vain to grieve.
Abolqasem Ferdowsi
#51. Let not one single life have passed in vain. What really matters is who you love and how you love.
Oprah Winfrey
#52. The vain.- We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities other ascribe to us - in order to deceive ourselves.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#53. To despise theory is to have the excessively vain pretension to do without knowing what one does, and to speak without knowing what one says.
Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle
#54. I know I only want him,' she said between sobs, the syllables all wrong, 'because he doesn't want me. How is that even possible?'
'It's normal to want what we can't have,' I said soothingly.
'No, I mean how can he not want me?
Olivia Sudjic
#55. Either fraternity is spontaneous, or it does not exist. To decree it is to annihilate it. The law can indeed force men to remain just; in vain would it would try to force them to be self-sacrificing.
Frederic Bastiat
#58. It is in vain that we get upon stilts, for once on them, it is still with our legs that we must walk. And on the highest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own ass.
Michel De Montaigne
#59. What exists in this heart is not imaginary. This hand would not grasp air in trying to hold you, nor this eye blind itself in searching for you in vain.
Chrissy Moon
#60. Love can take what shape he pleases; and when once begun his fiery inroad in the soul, how vain the after knowledge which his presence gives! We weep or rave; but still he lives, and lives master and lord, amidst pride and tears and pain.
Bryan Procter
#61. Judith (sadly): A change has come over my children of late. I have tried to shut my eyes to it, but in vain. At my time of life one must face bitter facts!
Noel Coward Sir
#62. Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it."
"Are you saying we shouldn't hope?"
"I'm saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open!
Margaret Weis
#63. It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.
James Russell Lowell
#64. 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
#65. If a man wants to get it right, he's looked up to and respected. If a woman wants to get it right, she's difficult or impossible. If he acts, produces and directs, he's called multitalented. If she does the same thing, she's called vain and egotistical.
Barbra Streisand
#66. Shed not for her a bitter tear; Nor give the heart to vain regret. Tis but the casket that lies here; the gem that fills it sparkles yet.
Belle Starr
#67. It gives me no joy to be praised at the expense of a better artist, by someone who does not know the difference or who thinks me too vain to be aware of it myself.
Mary Renault
#68. But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially.
Jacques Lacan
#69. 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
#70. When I am dead, no pageant train shall waste their sorrows at my bier. Nor worthless pomp of homage vain stain it with hypocritic tear.
Edward Everett
#71. In vain we call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing.
James Russell Lowell
#72. On Writing About Nora Hawks
I write about a female character to try, in vain, to understand two things: the purpose of life, and women.
Dennis R. Miller
#73. Let us all agree to die a little, or even completely so that African unity may not be a vain word
Ahmed Ben Bella
#74. All life is in vain, for Death makes a nonsense of pain.
Gasmaskman
#75. In vain he seeketh others to suppress, Who hath not learn'd himself first to subdue.
Edmund Spenser
#76. My dream is to be Endora in Bewitched. That's the part I want to do. I want to do a fabulous old woman. I want to be Maggie Smith someday. Not exactly like her, but that genre. I like that kind of humor - sophisticated, vain stuff.
Jackee Harry
#77. I've always made it a rule to have a suit for every day of the week. Perhaps you'll tell me I'm vain, but you'd be surprised if you knew what it had meant to me, at critical moments of my life, to be dressed exactly in accordance with my mood. It gives one such confidence, I think.
Christopher Isherwood
#78. While Thee I seek, protecting Power, Be my vain wishes stilled; And may this consecrated hour With better hopes be filled.
Helen Maria Williams
#79. There are men who love to gaze with the mind at things that can never be seen, feel at least the throb of a beauty that will never be known and hear over immense, bleak reaches the echo of that which is no celestial music but only their heart's vain cries.
A.E. Coppard
#80. The alchemist of the West has turned stone into glass
But my alchemy has transmuted glass into flint
Pharaohs of today have stalked me in vain
Muhammad Iqbal
#81. No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.
Jonathan Swift
#82. 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
#83. Reason, indeed, may oft complain For Nature's sad reality, And tell the suffering heart how vain Its cherished dreams must always be; And Truth may rudely trample down The flowers of Fancy, newly-blown:
Charlotte Bronte
#84. Life is a beautiful journey, full of joy and pain
You never know when it will end, don't let a moment pass in vain ...
In the whole ruckus of life, nothing had I gained,
I just wanted freedom, no more did I wanted to be chained ...
Mehek Bassi
#85. With fools, there is no companionship. Rather than to live with men who are selfish, vain, quarrelsome, and obstinate, let a man walk alone.
Buddha
#86. Thou art gone from my gaze like a beautiful dream. And I seek thee in vain by the meadow and stream.
George Linley
#87. Since nobody is in a position to substitute his own value judgments for those of the acting individual, it is vain to pass judgment on other people's aims and volitions. No man is qualified to declare what would make another man happier or less discontented.
Ludwig Von Mises
#88. 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
#89. Lightly from fair to fair he flew, And loved to plead, lament, and sue; Suit lightly won, and short-lived pain, For monarchs seldom sigh in vain.
Walter Scott
#90. Most men remember obligations, but are not often likely to be grateful; the proud are made sour by the remembrance and the vain silent.
William Gilmore Simms
#91. Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#93. How vain painting is, exciting admiration by its resemblance to things of which we do not admire the originals.
Blaise Pascal
#94. That I have wakened out of most glorious dreams, and found them all void and vain, is a horror I could bear and master
Charlotte Bronte
#95. I love you as exiled souls love each other when they meet in the middle of the desert. There will never be anything physical between us, but no passion is in vain, no love is ever wasted.
Paulo Coelho
#96. There are people out there who hate me and who say I'm arrogant, vain, and whatever. That's all part of my success. I am made to be the best.
Cristiano Ronaldo
#97. If someone calls me vain and mean, I know that he trusts me and has something to confess to me.
Karl Kraus
#98. Ask , and it shall be given until you. That is no vain or untried promise, Ruth!
Elizabeth Gaskell
#99. When you have planted
the rose of Love into your heart
your life has not been in vain.
Omar Khayyam
#100. May I not seem to have lived in vain.
Tycho Brahe
