These vain quotes will inspire you. Vain having or showing an excessively high opinion of one’s appearance, abilities, or worth or producing no result; useless.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging vain quotes, vain sayings, and vain proverbs.
Famous Vain Quotes
- “Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.” ~ Jane Austen
- “If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.” ~ Emily Dickinson
- “Live for yourself and you will live in vain; Live for others, and you will live again.” ~ Bob Marley
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“We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don’t care for.” ~ Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
- “Charm strikes the sight, but merit wins the soul.” ~ Alexander Pope
- “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” ~ Jane Austen
- “To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people.” ~ Max Beerbohm
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“I have been vain since birth.” ~ Wallace Shawn
- “Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.” ~ Alexander Pope
- “Look within.
Within you is the hidden God.
Within you is the immortal soul.
Within you is the inexhaustible spiritual treasure.
Within you is the ocean of bliss.
Look within for the happiness which you have sought in vain.” ~ Sivananda - “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
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“To be a man’s own fool is bad enough, but the vain man is everybody’s.” ~ William Penn
- “I am intrigued by glamorous women … A vain woman is continually taking out a compact to repair her makeup. A glamorous woman knows she doesn’t need to.” ~ Clark Gable
- “I’m not vain, I’m insecure.” ~ Mariah Carey
- “Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.” ~ Oscar Wilde
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“The common practice of keeping up appearances with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain.” ~ John Ruskin
- “If we have not peace within ourselves, it is in vain to seek it from outward sources.” ~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld
- “Nothing that we do, is done in vain. I believe, with all my soul, that we shall see triumph.” ~ Charles Dickens
- “You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell. What I mean is that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me.” ~ Charles Dickens
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“It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.” ~ William of Ockham
- “That we we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “I have been vain since birth. I expected other people to like what I did, although my vanity has definitely diminished over the years.” ~ Wallace Shawn
- “Do not follow vain desires; for verily he who prospers is preserved from lust, greed and anger.” ~ Abu Bakr
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“Living Life Tomorrow’s fate, though thou be wise, Thou canst not tell nor yet surmise; Pass, therefore, not today in vain, For it will never come again.” ~ Omar Khayyam
- “All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.” ~ George Orwell
- “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “A mighty pain to love it is,
And ’tis a pain that pain to miss;
But, of all pains, the greatest pain
Is to love, but love in vain.” ~ Abraham Cowley , Love in vain quotes -
“Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.” ~ Friedrich Schiller
- “I’m not the type of guy who enjoys one-night stands. It leaves me feeling very empty and cynical. It’s not even fun sexually. I need to feel something for the woman and entertain the vain hope that it may lead to a relationship.” ~ Ben Affleck
- “Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.” ~ Leo Rosten
- “Whoever, in the pursuit of science, seeks after immediate practical utility, may generally rest assured that he will seek in vain.” ~ Hermann von Helmholtz
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“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
- “If I can stop one heart from breaking…” Emily Dickinson If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain.” ~ Emily Dickinson
- “You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. Don’t let yourself indulge in vain wishes.” ~ Laurence J. Peter , Vain quotes about yourself
- “It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
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“It is in vain to expect our prayers to be heard, if we do not strive as well as pray.” ~ Aesop
- “Vanity is something that will only get in the way of doing your best work, and ultimately if you’re truly vain you care more about your work than how you look in your work. I actually consider myself a pretty vain guy when it comes to that.” ~ Philip Seymour Hoffman
- “Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” ~ Carl Jung
- “The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.” ~ Florence Nightingale
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“Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.” ~ W. H. Auden
- “I think the best actors are the most generous, the kindest, the greatest people and at their worst they are vain, greedy and insecure.” ~ Kenneth Branagh
- “When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “Life and death are important. Don’t suffer them in vain.” ~ Bodhidharma
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“Sweet is true love that is given in vain, and sweet is death that takes away pain.” ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson
- “No, my dog used to gaze at me, paying me the attention I need, the attention required to make a vain person like me understand that, being a dog, he was wasting time, but, with those eyes so much purer than mine, he’d keep on gazing at me with a look that reserved for me alone all his sweet and shaggy life, always near me, never troubling me, and asking nothing.” ~ Pablo Neruda
- “I’m too vain, one of my biggest sins, but it saved me; I can see what excess does.” ~ Grace Jones
- “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. -Mr. Darcy” ~ Jane Austen
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“When virtue and modesty enlighten her charms, the lustre of a beautiful woman is brighter than the stars of heaven, and the influence of her power it is in vain to resist.” ~ Akhenaton
- “The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.” ~ Theodor Adorno
- “If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.” ~ Samuel Adams
- “Sometimes women are so great and powerful, but then they surrender to these vain things. They kind of fall for it.” ~ Lykke Li
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“The vain being is the really solitary being.” ~ Berthold Auerbach
- “No endeavour is in vain;
Its reward is in the doing.” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - “Without common sense, all thine efforts are in vain.” ~ Rudolf Steiner
- “Chains tie us down by land and sea; And wishes, vain as mine, may be All that is left to comfort thee.” ~ William Wordsworth
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“Laws without morals are in vain.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
- “A source of permanent, accessible pleasure, our genitals exist. The god who created our misfortune, who made us short-lived, vain and cruel, has also provided this form of meagre compensation. If we couldn’t have sex from time to time, what would life be? A futile struggle against joints that stiffen, caries that form. All of which, moreover, is as uninteresting as humanly possible – the collagen which makes muscles stiffen, the appearance of microbic cavities in the gums.” ~ Michel Houellebecq
- “May the culture of life and love render vain the logic of death.” ~ Pope John Paul II
- “If you have to do with one who is unquestionably a slanderer, do not excuse him by calling him frank and free-spoken; do not call one who is notoriously vain, liberal and elegant; do not call dangerous levities mere simplicity; do not screen disobedience under the name of zeal; or arrogance, of frankness; or evil intimacy, of friendship. No, my friends, we must never, in our wish to shun slander, foster or flatter vice in others: but we must call evil evil, and sin sin, and so doing we shall serve God’s glory.” ~ Saint Francis de Sales
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“Not from a vain or shallow thought His awful Jove young Phidias brought.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “She also considered very seriously what she would look like in a little cottage in the middle of the forest, dressed in a melancholy gray and holding communion only with the birds and trees; a life of retirement away from the vain world; a life into which no man came. It had its attractions, but she decided that gray did not suit her.” ~ A. A. Milne
- “To be ambitious of true honor and of the real glory and perfection of our nature is the very principle and incentive of virtue; but to be ambitious of titles, place, ceremonial respects, and civil pageantry, is as vain and little as the things are which we court” ~ Philip Sidney
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“He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.” ~ Edith Wharton
- “A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the lord in vain- then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system?” ~ Robert A. Heinlein
- “Vain men delight in telling what Honours have been done them, what great Company they have kept, and the like; by which they plainly confess, that these Honours were more than their Due, and such as their Friends would not believe if they had not been told: Whereas a Man truly proud, thinks the greatest Honours below his Merit, and consequently scorns to boast. I therefore deliver it as a Maxim that whoever desires the Character of a proud Man, ought to conceal his Vanity.” ~ Jonathan Swift
Vain too proud of your own appearance, abilities, achievements, etc.
