A mighty pain to love it is, and 'tis a pain that pain to miss; but of all the pains, the greatest pain is to love, but love in vain.
Abraham Crowley

A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain.
Jessamyn West

A vain man finds it wise to speak good or ill of himself; a modest man does not talk of himself.
Jean de la Bruyere

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

About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
Edsger Dijkstra

Accuracy is, in every case, advantageous to beauty, and just reasoning to delicate sentiment. In vain would we exalt the one by depreciating the other.
David Hume

Affliction is not sent in vain, young man, from that good God, who chastens whom he loves.
Robert Southey

Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.
Friedrich Schiller

All Juleps are made for present use, and therefore it is in vain to speak of their duration.
Nicholas Culpeper

All other ways of mortification are vain, all helps leave us helpless, it must be done by the Spirit.
John Owen

All speech is vain and empty unless it be accompanied by action.
Demosthenes

An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may.
William Hazlitt

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.
T. S. Eliot

And though all streams flow from a single course to cleanse the blood from polluted hand, they hasten on their course in vain.
Aeschylus

And weep the more, because I weep in vain.
Thomas Gray

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
Alexander Pope

Because just as arms have no force outside if there is no counsel within a house, study is vain and counsel useless that is not put to virtuous effect when the time calls.
Francois Rabelais

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.
Theodor Adorno

But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially.
Jacques Lacan

Christianity, democracy, science, education, wealth, and the cumulative inheritance of a thousand years, have not preserved us from the vain repetition of history.
Ralph A. Cram