Vain Quotes - Page 30

• It is the Land of Truth (enchanted name!), surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the true home of illusion, where many a fog bank and ice, that soon melts away, tempt us to believe in new lands, while constantly deceiving the adventurous mariner with vain hopes, and involving him in adventures which he can never leave, yet never bring to an end.

  Immanuel Kant

  Believe, Ocean, Home

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• Do you think it is a vain hope that one day man will find joy in noble deeds of light and mercy, rather than in the coarse pleasures he indulges in today -- gluttony, fornication, ostentation, boasting, and envious vying with his neighbor? I am certain this is not a vain hope and that the day will come soon.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Men, Thinking, Light

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2011). “The Brothers Karamazov”, p.545, Bantam Classics

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• What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Dream, Depressing, People

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2016). “101 Facts of life”, p.31, Publishdrive

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• Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Simple, Vanity, Ego

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau “Jean-Jacgues Rousseau Emile or On Education”, Рипол Классик

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• I pulled myself up and told myself to stop these ridiculous thoughts, wondering why it is that we can never stop trying to analyse the motives of people who have no personal interest in us, in the vain hope of finding that perhaps they may have just a little after all.

  Barbara Pym

  People, Trying, May

  Barbara Pym (2006). “Excellent Women”, p.162, Penguin

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• I've been accused of being very vain about my apathy.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Apathy, Accused

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• Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul, that soft summer morning round a turning in the path, the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones, its legs in the air like a woman in need burning its wedding poisons like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs, I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound, but I touch my body in vain to find the wound. I am the vampire of my own heart, one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter who can no longer smile. Am I dead? I must be dead.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Summer, Morning, Laughter

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• How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.

  David Mitchell

  Writing, Winter, Would Be

  David Mitchell (2008). “Cloud Atlas”, p.83, Hachette UK

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• I would have done the same thing I did. I would have put all my energy into loving someone that wasn't you. I would have tried in vain, every day, to not think about you, and what could have been. What should have been. I would have tried to convince myself that there's no such thing as true love, except for the love you yourself make work, even though I know better....The bottom line is I never had any business marrying anyone who wasn't you.

  Jonathan Tropper

  Love You, Thinking, Should Have

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• Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Struggle, Boredom, Antichrist

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2013). “The Selected Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche”, p.729, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  Pain, Believe, Helping Others

  "We Bereaved". Book by Helen Keller, 1929.

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• She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, ‘All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Past, Giving, Shadow

  Elizabeth Gaskell (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell (Illustrated)”, p.1055, Delphi Classics

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• When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.

  C. S. Lewis

  Gratitude, Doors, Silence

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.6, Faber & Faber

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• Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself. So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future? But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.

  Blaise Pascal

  Mean, Vanity, People

  Blaise Pascal (2008). “Human Happiness”, Penguin Group USA

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• Clichés so often befall vain people.

  Ann Beattie

  People

  Ann Beattie (2010). “Walks With Men: Fiction”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• His golden locks Time hath to silver turned,
  O time too swift! O swiftness never ceasing!
  His youth 'gainst Time and Age hath ever spurned,
  But spurned in vain! Youth waneth by increasing.

  George Peele

  Time, Age, Locks

  'Polyhymnia' (1590) ad fin. 'Sonnet'

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• Closet communion needs time for the revelation of God's presence. It is vain to say, "I have too much work to do to find time." You must find time or forfeit blessing. God knows how to save for you the time you sacredly keep for communion with Him.

  Arthur Tappan Pierson

  Time, Prayer, Blessing

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• Men are but children of a larger growth, Our appetites as apt to change as theirs, And full as craving too, and full as vain.

  John Dryden

  Change, Time, Children

  All for Love act 4, sc. 1 (1678)

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• Those people work more wisely who seek to achieve good in their own small corner of the world ... than those who are forever thinking that life is in vain, unless one can. do big things.

  Herbert Butterfield

  Time, Attitude, Thinking

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• I am inclined to think that one's education has been in vain if one fails to learn that most schoolmasters are idiots.

  Hesketh Pearson

  Success, Education, Thinking

  Hesketh Pearson (1965). “Hesketh Pearson by Himself. (1. Ed.)”, London : Heinemann

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• The essence of Vanderbilt is still learning, the essence of its outlook is still liberty, and liberty and learning will be and must be the touchstones of Vanderbilt University and of any free university in this country or the world. I say two touchstones, yet they are almost inseparable, inseparable if not indistinguishable, for liberty without learning is always in peril, and learning without liberty is always in vain.

  John F. Kennedy

  Country, Freedom, Responsibility

  Vanderbilt University 90th Anniversary Convocation Address, delivered 18 May 1963, Vanderbilt University Stadium, Nashville Tennessee

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• Would all, who cherish such wild wishes, but look around them, they would oftenest find their sphere of duty, of prosperity, and happiness, within those precincts, and in that station where Providence itself has cast their lot. Happy they who read the riddle without a weary world-search, or a lifetime spent in vain!

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Happiness, Wish, Looks

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (1982). “Tales and Sketches”, p.606, Library of America

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• Vain hopes are like certain dreams of those who wake.

  Quintilian

  Dream, Hope, Certain

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• In vain sedate reflections we would make
  When half our knowledge we must snatch, not take.

  Alexander Pope

  Knowledge, Reflection, Half

  Alexander Pope (1847). “The works of Alexander Pope, with notes and illustrations, by himself and others. To which are added, a new life of the author [&c.] by W. Roscoe”, p.181

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• Life is a smoke that curls-
  Curls in a flickering skein,
  That winds and whisks and whirls,
  A figment thin and vain,
  Into the vast inane.
  One end for hut and hall.

  William Ernest Henley

  Life, Wind, Curls

  William Ernest Henley, Robert Louis Stevenson (1908). “The Works of W. E. Henley: Poems”

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