Vain Quotes - Page 20

• Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade! Ah, fields beloved in vain! Where once my careless childhood stray'd, A stranger yet to pain! I feel the gales that from ye blow A momentary bliss bestow.

  Thomas Gray

  Happiness, Pain, Blow

  Thomas Campbell, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Gray (1872). “The Poetical Works of Campbell, Goldsmith and Gray: With Memoirs of the Authors”, p.391

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• Spangling the wave with lights as vain As pleasures in the vale of pain, That dazzle as they fade.

  Walter Scott

  Pain, Light, Dazzle

  Walter Scott, Sir Walter Scott (1841). “The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart”, p.415

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• 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

  Life, Pain, Suits

  Sir Walter Scott (1866). “The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott”, p.102

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• In working well, if travail you sustain, Into the wind shall lightly pass the pain; But of the deed the glory shall remain, And cause your name with worthy wights to reign. In working wrong, if pleasure you attain, The pleasure soon shall fade, and void as vain; But of the deed throughout the life the shame Endures, defacing you with foul defame.

  Nicholas Grimald

  Life, Pain, Wind

  Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, Thomas Sackville Earl of Dorset, Nicholas Grimald, Thomas Vaux Baron Vaux (1854). “Poetical Works of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: Minor Contemporaneous Poets, and Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst”, p.210

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• Or hast thou known the world so long in vain?

  John Dryden

  Birthday, Long, World

  Juvenal, John Dryden, Nahum Tate, Persius, Richard Duke (1713). “The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis: and of Aulus Persius Flaccus”, p.210

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• What, start at this! when sixty years have spread. Their grey experience o'er thy hoary head? Is this the all observing age could gain? Or hast thou known the world so long in vain?

  John Dryden

  Birthday, Years, Long

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• I am on this account not displeased that the Figure is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America... He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Silly, Eagles, Turkeys

  Franklin's Letter to His Daughter (excerpt), www.greatseal.com.

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• And weep the more, because I weep in vain.

  Thomas Gray

  Thomas Gray (1836). “The works of Thomas Gray (ed. by J. Mitford).”, p.91

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• You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. Who ever planted an iroko tree — the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with the greatness in men.

  Chinua Achebe

  Greatness, Men, Yams

  Chinua Achebe (2011). “No Longer at Ease”, p.58, Anchor

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• Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.

  Fredric Jameson

  Winning, Degrees, Machines

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• Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
  Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.

  Herman Melville

  Ocean, Dark, Blue

  Herman Melville (2016). “Moby-Dick”, p.184, Tyché

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• If you pray for a thing, but have fear as you pray, that you may not receive it, or that your prayer will not be acted upon by Infinite Intelligence, your prayer will have been in vain.

  Napoleon Hill

  Prayer, Infinite Intelligence, May

  Napoleon Hill, Wallace D. Wattles (2012). “Get Rich Collection”, p.148, Penguin

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• Charles Darwin [is my personal favorite Fellow of the Royal Society]. I suppose as a physical scientist I ought to have chosen Newton. He would have won hands down in an IQ test, but if you ask who was the most attractive personality then Darwin is the one you'd wish to meet. Newton was solitary and reclusive, even vain and vindictive in his later years when he was president of the society.

  Martin Rees

  Years, Hands, Personality

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• 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

  Love, Business, Stupid

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• We are so vain as to set the highest value upon those things to which nature has assigned the lowest place. What can be more coarse and rude in the mind than the precious metals, or more slavish and dirty than the people that dig and work them? And yet they defile our minds more than our bodies, and make the possessor fouler than the artificer of them. Rich men, in fine, are only the greater slaves.

  Seneca the Younger

  Dirty, Men, People

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• 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

  Running, Athlete, Men

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• Empty me of the selfishness inside, every vain ambition and the poison of my pride, and any foolish thing my heart holds to, Lord empty me of me so I can be filled with you.

  Chris Sligh

  Christian, Heart, Ambition

  Song: Empty Me, Album: Running Back to You, 2008

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• Those dreams that on the silent night intrude, and with false flitting shapes our minds delude ... are mere productions of the brain. And fools consult interpreters in vain.

  Jonathan Swift

  Dream, Night, Mind

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• As everyone knows, the ancients before Aristotle did not consider the dream a product of the dreaming mind, but a divine inspiration, and in ancient times the two antagonistic streams, which one finds throughout in the estimates of dream life, were already noticeable. They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction.

  Sigmund Freud

  Dream, Inspiration, Two

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• Leave those vain moralists, my friend, and return to the depth of your soul: that is where you will always rediscover the source of the sacred fire which so often inflamed us with love of the sublime virtues; that is where you will see the eternal image of true beauty, the contemplation of which inspires us with a holy enthusiasm.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Fire, Inspire, Soul

  'La Nouvelle Hèloise' (1761, ed. M. Launay, 1967) pt. 2, letter 11

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• Sweet Mercy! to the gates of heaven This minstrel lead, his sins forgiven; The rueful conflict, the heart riven With vain endeavour, And memory of Earth's bitter leaven Effaced forever.

  William Wordsworth

  Sweet, Memories, Heart

  William Wordsworth (1854). “The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth”, p.239

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• A word of kindness is seldom spoken in vain, while witty saying are as easily lost as the pearls slipping from a broken string.

  George D. Prentice

  Witty, Kindness, Broken

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• All that is deformed ought to be reformed. The Word of God alone teaches us what ought to be so, and all reform effected otherwise is vain.

  Francis Lambert

  Religious, Religion, Reform

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• I am beginning to think of the human imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds.

  Philip Larkin

  Spiritual, Thinking, Odds

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• Not so in haste, my heart! Have faith in God and wait; Although he linger long, He never comes too late. He never comes too late, He knoweth what is best: Vex not thyself in vain; Until he cometh, rest. Until he cometh, rest. Nor grudge the hours that roll: The feet that wait for God Are soonest at the goal. Are soonest at the goal. That is not gained by speed; Then hold thee still, my heart, For I shall wait his lead.

  Bradford Torrey

  Heart, Feet, Long

  Bradford Torrey, “Not So In Haste, My Heart”

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