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Tag Name "Vain" (683)

Page 12 of 29
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It is in vain that a man of sound mind and cool temper understands the condition of such a wretched being... He can no more communicate his own wisdom to him than a healthy man can instil his strength into the invalid by whose bedside he is seated.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.
Albert Camus
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Perhaps already I am dead, And these perhaps are phantoms vain - These motley phantasies that pass At night through my disordered brain. Perhaps with ancient heathen shapes, Old faded gods, this brain is full Who, for their most unholy rites, Have chosen a dead poet's skull.
Heinrich Heine
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Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place if we do not understand him, it is our own fault.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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To feel oppressed by obligation is only to prove that we are incapable of a proper sentiment of gratitude. To receive favors from the unworthy is simply to admit that our selfishness is superior to our pride. Most men remember obligations, but not often to be grateful for them. The proud are made sour by the remembrance and the vain silent.
William Gilmore Simms
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A melancholy air can never be the right thing what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded. It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it is the person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior.
Stendhal
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When the vain speaker has sat down, and the people say 'what a good speech,' it still takes an ounce to balance an ounce.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders.
Stephen Vizinczey
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Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.
Leo Rosten
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Rain which falls upon the sea is useless so is food for one who is satiated in vain is a gift for one who is wealthy and a burning lamp during the daytime is useless.
Chanakya
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I buy smoked mackerel in a vain attempt at being healthy. I do actually really like it, and you don't have to cook it, which is handy.
Jo Brand
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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
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If I can, by a lucky chance, in these uneasy days, rub out one wrinkle from the brow of care, or beguile the heavy heart of one moment of sadness if I can, how and then, prompt a happier view of human nature, and make my reader more in good humor with his fellow-beings and himself, surely, I shall not have written in vain.
Washington Irving
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In the desert you become a discoverer. You discover your soul, which had been submerged in vain pursuits, which had been lost in the coils and toils of modern life. You discover your kinship with nature and man, which is evoked by the naturalness and the gentle humanity of the natives of the desert, and you will also discover God.
Ameen Rihani
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I see the rainbow in the sky, the dew upon the grass I see them, and I ask not why they glimmer or they pass. With folded arms I linger not to call them back 'twere vain: In this, or in some other spot, I know they'll shine again.
Walter Savage Landor
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In the mountains of wisdom no climbing is in vain.
Nhat Hanh
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To teach vain Wits that Science little known, T' admire Superior Sense, and doubt their own!
Alexander Pope
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Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Royalty consists not in vain pomp, but in great virtues
Agesilaus II
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Thus grows up fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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It is vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving wherein men find pleasure to be deceived.
John Locke
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I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.
John Keats
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Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.
William Butler Yeats
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Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.
Johann Georg Hamann
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