Vain Quotes - Page 31

• Our life must once have end; in vain we fly
  From following Fate; e'en now, e'en now, we die.

  Lucretius

  Life, Fate, Ends

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• Sweet is true love though given in vain, in vain;
  And sweet is death who puts an end to pain:
  I know not which is sweeter, no, not I.
  Love, art thou sweet? then bitter death must be:
  Love, thou art bitter; sweet is death to me.
  O Love, if death be sweeter, let me die.
  ...
  I fain would follow love, if that could be;
  I needs must follow death, who calls for me;
  Call and I follow, I follow! let me die.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Life, Sweet, Art

  Alfred Lord Tennyson (2013). “Idylls of the King”, p.159, Simon and Schuster

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• Alas! they had been friends in youth;
  But whispering tongues can poison truth,
  And constancy lives in realms above;
  And life is thorny, and youth is vain;
  And to be wroth with one we love
  Doth work like madness in the brain.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Life, Brain, Poison

  'Christabel' pt. 2 (1800) (l. 408)

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• How happy the lover,
  How easy his chain,
  How pleasing his pain,
  How sweet to discover
  He sighs not in vain.

  John Dryden

  Life, Sweet, Pain

  John Dryden (1762). “The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, Esq: In Six Volumes”, p.372

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• To hear complaints with patience, even when complaints are vain, is one of the duties of friendship.

  Samuel Johnson

  Patience, Be Patient, Duty

  Samuel Johnson (1761). “The Rambler: In Four Volumes”, p.32

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• Some rhyme a neebor's name to lash;
  Some rhyme (vain thought!) for needfu' cash;
  Some rhyme to court the countra clash,
  An' raise a din;
  For me, an aim I never fash;
  I rhyme for fun.

  Robert Burns

  Fun, Names, Poetry

  'To J. S[mith]' (1786) st. 5

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• I looked more widely around me, I studied the lives of the masses of humanity, and I saw that, not two or three, or ten, but hundreds, thousands, millions, had so understood the meaning of life that they were able both to live and to die. All these people were well acquainted with the meaning of life and death, quietly labored, endured privation and suffering, lived and died, and saw in all this, not a vain, but a good thing.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Life, Courage, Two

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• Thou art gone from my gaze like a beautiful dream,
  And I seek thee in vain by the meadow and stream.

  George Linley

  I Miss You, Missing You, Beautiful

  "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations" by John Bartlett, 10th ed., 1919.

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• 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

  Sympathy, Regret, Lying

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• A farmer who had a quarrelsome family called his sons and told them to lay a bunch of sticks before him. Then, after laying the sticks parallel to one another and binding them, he challenged his sons, one after one, to pick up the bundle and break it. They all tried, but in vain. Then, untying the bundle, he gave them the sticks to break one by one. This they did with the greatest ease. Then said the father, "Thus, my sons, as long as you remain united, you are a match for anything, but differ and separate, and you are undone".

  Aesop

  Family, Teamwork, Father

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• 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

  Teacher, Hands, Atheism

  George Bernard Shaw (2015). “The Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw (Illustrated): Including Renowned Titles like Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, The Inca Of Perusalem, Macbeth Skit, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion”, p.2901, e-artnow

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• Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have .. the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality .. which, from time to time, reveals itself to be vain and illusory.

  Luigi Pirandello

  Acceptance, Reality, Needs

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• I have done what I could do in life, and if I could not do better, I did not deserve it. In vain I have tried to step beyond what bound me.

  Maurice Maeterlinck

  Acceptance, Done, Steps

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• It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, ''Know thyself,'' and too often leads to a self- estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

  George Eliot

  Fear, Acceptance, Self

  George Eliot (1866). “Felix Holt: The Radical”, p.32

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• The advance of science is not comparable to the changes of a city, where old edifices are pitilessly torn down to give place to new, but to the continuous evolution of zoologic types which develop ceaselessly and end by becoming unrecognisable to the common sight, but where an expert eye finds always traces of the prior work of the centuries past. One must not think then that the old-fashioned theories have been sterile and vain.

  Henri Poincare

  Eye, Science, Past

  Henri Poincare (2012). “The Value of Science: Essential Writings of Henri Poincare”, p.328, Modern Library

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• The nakedness of the indigent world may be clothed from the trimmings of the vain.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  World, May, Poverty

  Oliver Goldsmith (1823). “The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale”, p.271

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• True, I talk of dreams, Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.

  William Shakespeare

  Dream, Children, Brain

  1595 Mercutio. Romeo andJuliet, act1, sc.4, l.96-8.

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• Fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism ... tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.

  William Hazlitt

  Fashion, Issues, Clothes

  William Hazlitt (1839). “Sketches and Essays”, p.205

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• Long customs are not easily broken; he that attempts to change the course of his own life very often labors in vain; and how shall we do that for others, which we are seldom able to do for ourselves.

  Samuel Johnson

  Long, Broken, Able

  Samuel Johnson (1856). “Rasselas”, p.54

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• Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

  William Hazlitt

  Death, Dying, Consciousness

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.171, Delphi Classics

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• 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

  Time, People, Giving

  Jonathan Swift, John Hawkesworth (1755). “The Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D. Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin: Accurately Revised in Six Volumes, Adorned with Copper-plates : with Some Account of the Author's Life and Notes Historical and Explanatory”, p.222

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• Never was flattery lost on a poet's ear; a simple race, they waste their toil for the vain tribute of a smile.

  Walter Scott

  Simple, Race, Toil

  'The Lay of the Last Minstrel' (1805) canto 4, ad fin.

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• I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear, or anything but that vain animal who is so proud of being rational.

  John Wilmot

  Dog, Animal, Proud

  John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (2006). “The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester”, p.23, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• The black masses want not to be shrunk from as though they are plague-ridden. They want not to be walled up in slums, in the ghettos, like animals. They want to live in an open, free society where they can walk with their heads up, like men, and women! Few white people realize that many black people today dislike and avoid spending more time than they must about white people. This 'integration' image, as it is popularly interpreted, has millions of vain, self-exalted white people convinced that black people want to sleep in bed with them - and that's a lie!

  Malcolm X

  Lying, Sleep, Ghetto

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• It is not vain glory for a man and his glass to confer in his own chamber.

  William Shakespeare

  Men, Vanity, Glasses

  William Shakespeare, Nikolaus Delius (1855). “Shakspere's Werke: Romeo and Juliet. Cymbeline. Troilus and Cressida. Coriolanus. Julius Caesar. Antony and Cleopatra”

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