Quotes About Vain

I only know we loved in vain; I only feel-farewell! farewell!

Love, so many People use your Name in vain.

It is good to be tired and wearied by the vain search after the true good, that we may stretch out our arms to the Redeemer.

Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow, do you understand my pain? Are you willing to risk it all or is your love in vain?

Oh my God." She waited for the chastising sting of the mark, which acted like a behavioral-modification dog collar. When the burn didn't come after taking the Lord's name in vain, she found some of the fog in her brain lifting.

Love, I thought to myself abstractedly. Not 'This is love' or 'Is this love?' Not a sentence, not a certainty, not a thought with moving parts or direction. Just love, all of it, as it is. Whether it's enough or not. Wthether it's real or we're making it up. However shoddy it gets, or bent out of shape. It's still extraordinary. However foolish, however vain. However badly it ends. Love.

Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?

Against boredom the gods themselves fight in vain.

Somewhere in the dark a vast meaninglessness was beckoning to him. A grinning face that laughed scornfully at all his vain attempts to manage his life.

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied by a chance bond together.

One went through the vain motions, but it was mostly a waste of life.

But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound.

I have an innate passion for contradiction—my whole life has been nothing but a series of melancholy and vain contradictions of heart or reason.

Je porte en moi une âme corrompue par le monde, une imagination inquiète, un cÅ"ur insatiable; pour moi tout est petit : je m'habitue au chagrin aussi facilement qu'au plaisir, et ma vie devient plus vaine de jour en jour.

How defenseless we are in the face of flattery!

Was he happy? One would ask that question in vain. A question like this makes sense only when applied to creatures who are rich in alternative possibilities, so that the actual truth can be contrasted with partly real probabilities and reflect itself in them.

More terrible, to see how feline Fate will sometimes dally with a human soul, and by a nameless magic make it repulse a sane despair with a hope which is but mad. Unwittingly I imp this cat-like thing, sporting with the heart of him who reads; for if he feel not he reads in vain.

Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy!

majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank! How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.

Jealousy and pride were equally vain.

Jacinta knew from the start that this city was a woman, cruel and vain; she learned to fear her and never look her in the eye.

Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38

Idle dreaming is the mother of the fear of death, the sentimental deploring of what has been and the vain turning back of the clock.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination, resting solely on empirical grounds, and it is vain to expect that these should define an action by which one could attain the totality of a series of consequences which is really endless.