Top 68 Vainly Quotes
#1. Think not, O Mortal, vainly gay.
That Thou from Human Woes is free,
The bitter cup I drink today,
Tomorrow may be drunk by thee.
Jane Grey
#2. How vainly men themselves amaze To win the palm, the oak, or bays; And their uncessant labours see Crown'd from some single herb or tree. Whose short and narrow verged shade Does prudently their toils upbraid; While all flow'rs and all trees do close To weave the garlands of repose.
Andrew Marvell
#3. My friend, be not like him who sits by his fireside and watches the fire go out, then blows vainly upon the dead ashes. Do not give up hope or yield to despair because of that which is past, for to bewail the irretrievable is the worst of human frailties.
Khalil Gibran
#4. Be not under the dominion of thine own will; it is the vice of the ignorant, who vainly presume on their own understanding.
Miguel De Cervantes
#5. Next day on returning I found him dead in the snow with his head on the sill of the door - the door of his puppyhood's days; my dog to the last in his heart of hearts - it was my help he sought, and vainly sought, in the hour of his bitter extremity.
Ernest Thompson Seton
#6. Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
Fulke Greville
#7. We must not stint
Our necessary actions in the fear
To cope malicious censurers, which ever,
As rav'nous fishes, do a vessel follow
That is new-trimmed, but benefit no further
Than vainly longing.
William Shakespeare
#8. I recalled the voice I had heard; again I questioned whence it came, as vainly as before: it seemed in me not in the external world. I asked, was it a mere nervous impression a delusion? I could not conceive or believe: it was more like an inspiration.
Charlotte Bronte
#9. I had vainly been seeking a description of consciousness within science; instead, what I and others have to look for is a description of science within consciousness. We must develop a science compatible with consciousness, our primary experience.
Amit Goswami
#10. If from the beginning you always believed that a ticket was only one-way, then you wouldn't have to try so vainly to cling to the sand like an oyster to a rock.
Kobo Abe
#11. I am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.
John Brown
#12. She put the Trust into her sister's hand. Magdalen took it from her mechanically. "You!" she said, looking at her sister with the remembrance of all that she had vainly ventured, of all that she had vainly suffered, at St. Crux - "you have found it!
Wilkie Collins
#13. The man who to untimely death is doomed Vainly would hedge him in from the assault of harm; He bears the seed of ruin in himself.
Matthew Arnold
#14. He could feel the shape of his eyeballs beneath his lids, round and hot, tasty bits of jelly rolling restless to and fro, looking vainly for oblivion, while the rising sun turned his lids a dark and bloody red.
Diana Gabaldon
#15. Philosophy became a gloomy science, in the labyrinth of which people vainly tried to find the exit, called The Truth.
Edward Joseph Schwartz
#16. It is the missed opportunity that counts, and in a love that vainly yearns from behind prison bars you have perchance the love supreme.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#17. Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates - but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.
Lord Byron
#18. There aren't many irritations to match the condescension which a woman metes out to a man who she believes has loved her vainly for the past umpteen years.
Edward Hoagland
#19. In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle; dying, their souls enter a gray misty realm of clouds and icy winds, to wander cheerlessly throughout eternity.
Robert E. Howard
#20. No more shall ye behold such sights of woe, deeds I have suffered and myself have wrought; henceforward quenched in darkness shall ye see those ye should ne'er have seen; now blind to those whom, when I saw, I vainly yearned to know.
Sophocles
#21. Enjoy your own authentic stupidity rather than strive vainly to be wise.
David Brandon
#22. The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#23. Do not vainly lament, but do wonder at the rule of transiency and learn from it the emptiness of human life. Do not cherish to unworthy desire that the changeable might become unchanging.
Gautama Buddha
#24. Anger needed an anchor, a plug, a wall. (I am angry because of .)
Otherwise you had a beam of red feeling searching vainly through the universe. You had a heart that shot red light into space.
Karen Russell
#25. He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle.
Vladimir Nabokov
#26. I threw it away feeling sorry to have vainly destroyed a flower that looked beautiful in its proper place. How many different plant lives man destroys to support his own existence.
Leo Tolstoy
#27. Hundreds, thousands, aye, millions of human beings, men, women and children, wander the streets of our cities and the highways of our country, hungry, ragged and cold, vainly seeking in this land of plenty, where physical want should be unknown.
Victoria Woodhull
#29. A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#30. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.
H.P. Lovecraft
#31. What good is there in being blind, you ask? Well, maybe it's to see the beauty on the inside without being vainly distracted, or superficially blinded, by the ugly on the outside.
Criss Jami
#32. Of all earthly creatures, humans alone have the power to choose. One must never lose time in vainly regretting the past nor in complaining about the changes which cause us discomfort, for change is the very essence of life.
Anatole France
#33. A poet in his senses knocks vainly at the gates of poetry.
Ben Johnson
#34. Unless a tree has borne blossoms in spring, you will vainly look for fruit on it in autumn.
Walter Scott
#35. So much the worse for you!" he said mentally, like a man who, after vainly attempting to extinguish a fire, should fly in a rage with his vain efforts and say, "Oh, very well then! you shall burn for this!
Leo Tolstoy
#36. Like any wise ruler, Abbot Arkos did not issue orders vainly, when to disobey was possible and to enforce was not possible. It was better to look the other way than to command ineffectually.
Walter M. Miller Jr.
#37. For wisest ends this universal Power Gave appetites, from whose quick impulse life Subsists, by which we only live, all life Insipid else, unactive, unenjoy'd. Hence to this peopled earth, which, that extinct, That flame for propagation, soon would roll A lifeless mass, and vainly cumber heaven.
John Armstrong
#38. What I used to do with a passion, foolishly and vainly imagining I would change the world for the better, I no longer tolerate in myself or anyone else. But draw, always draw - and WRITE.
Ralph Steadman
#39. Yet what each one does is by no means of little moment. The grass has to put forth all its energy to draw sustenance from the uttermost tips of its rootlets simply to grow where it is as grass; it does not vainly strive to become a banyan tree; and so the earth gains a lovely carpet of green.
Rabindranath Tagore
#40. But that was too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they - he - had once fitted together. -
Julian Barnes
#41. Not even for an hour can you bear to be alone, nor can you advantageously apply your leisure time, but you endeavor, a fugitive and wanderer, to escape from yourself, now vainly seeking to banish remorse by wine, and now by sleep; but the gloomy companion presses on you, and pursues you as you fly.
Horace
#42. Be free; hope for nothing from anyone. I am sure if you look back upon your lives you will find that you were always vainly trying to get help from others which never came.
Swami Vivekananda
#43. Hypochondriacs squander large sums of time in search of nostrums by which they vainly hope they may get more time to squander.
Mortimer Collins
#44. There was so much of beauty here: the neat, small tracks of a foraging creature, stoat or marten; the inticate tracery of a skeleton leaf, still clinging vainly to its parent tree as, little by little, time stripped it of its substance, leaving only the delicate remembrance of what it had been.
Juliet Marillier
#45. There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.
Michel De Montaigne
#46. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I lookj into the depths of thif unfathomable wather, wherein, as momentary lights glanced nto it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged.
Charles Dickens
#47. I would rather dwell in the dim fog of superstition than in air rarefied to nothing by the air-pump of unbelief-in which the panting breast expires, vainly and convulsively gasping for breath.
Jean Paul
#48. The temporal heart resonates at whispers
From a Truth overarching
Of whose countenance
Timeless Intellect yearns vainly to fathom
Ashim Shanker
#49. They called out. Everything was still. Finally, after vainly trying to force the door, they
Oscar Wilde
#50. By mere burial man arrives not at bliss; and in the future life, throughout its whole infinite range, they will seek for happiness as vainly as they sought it here, who seek it in aught else than that which so closely surrounds them here - the Infinite.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
#51. Vainly you talk about voting it down. When you have cast your millions of ballots, you have not reached the evil. It has fastened its root deep into the heart of the nation, and nothing but God's truth and love can cleanse the land. We must change the moral sentiment.
Frederick Douglass
#52. I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.
Salman Rushdie
#53. Because of its divine institution for the propagation of man, the seed is not to be vainly ejaculated, nor is it to be damaged, nor is it to be wasted.
Pope Clement I
#54. We are one ... alone ... and only ... and we love you who are one ... alone ... and only. We looked into each other's eyes and we knew the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly. And we felt torn, torn for some word we could not find.
Ayn Rand
#55. Ignorance may find a truth on its doorstep that erudition vainly seeks in the stars.
George Iles
#56. The woman has circumvented man in a variety of ways in her unconsciously subtle ways, as the man has vainly and equally consciously struggled to thwart the woman in gaining ascendancy over him.
Mahatma Gandhi
#57. The supreme trick of mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join in the madness of others, the one who tries vainly to resist. We will never understand totalitarianism if we do not understand that people rarely have the strength to be uncommon.
Eugene Ionesco
#58. My mind shrank from the menace sweeping down on us, as children's do from belief in death and misfortune, vainly clinging to the fancy that great disasters only happen to other people.
Sylvia Pankhurst
#59. He vainly said that human will is free,
Voltaire
#60. Oh, how I vainly wished to the bearded man in the sky that I was Neapolitan. Why? So I could bring in a fine Neapolitan pest control to help with Queensberry's problem before it gets out of hand.
Oscar Wilde
#61. Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore.
Edgar Allan Poe
#62. perhaps like me she's vainly hoping
and some news awaits,
but the moist earth already holds him
in her strong embrace...
Nikola Vaptsarov
#63. How vainly shall we endeavor to repress crime by our barbarous punishment of the poorer class of criminals so long as children are reared in the brutalizing influences of poverty, so long as the bite of want drives men to crime.
Henry George
#64. In ambition, as in love, the successful can afford to be indulgent toward their rivals. The prize our own, it is graceful to recognize the merit that vainly aspired to it.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#65. L'on a beau se cacher a' soi-me me, l'on aime toujours. We vainly conceal from ourselves the fact that we are always in love.
Blaise Pascal
#66. O, brothers! let us leave the shame and sin Of taking vainly in a plaintive mood, The holy name of Grief
holy herein, That, by the grief of One, came all our good.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#67. I know a mount, the gracious Sun perceives
First when he visits, last, too, when he leaves
The world; and, vainly favored, it repays
The day-long glory of his steadfast gaze
By no change of its large calm front of snow.
Robert Browning
#68. A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
Christopher Morley
