vainness

• “O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men!”

  There but for the Grace of God…? | Mind on Fire

• ““Oh dear!” exclaimed Ariadne, feeling the vainness of her wish to fly from the god.”

  Phineas Redux

• “I have seen the strange madness of futility fall upon them when a little thing like a spinning dust-cloud, or the hollow crying of a bird, or the moan of the wind through bare branches brought to their gloomy minds the emptiness of life and the vainness of existence.”

  The Coming of Conan The Cimmerian

• “If only we could have a cup of good hot coffee first, before we start," said Beth, and she smiled at the vainness of the thought.”

  The Furnace of Gold

• “It was become such a world as did not seem worth a man's while to live in: a world of vainness, of hollowness, of meanness, of nothing but illusions.”

  Bardelys the Magnificent; being an account of the strange wooing pursued by the Sieur Marcel de Saint-Pol, marquis of Bardelys...

• “It was as though the love letter of Juliet had led her here to show her as in a glass darkly the vainness of love in the vainness of life.”

  The Ghost Girl

• “Jochanan Hakka-dosh, the saintly prop of Israel, expounds from his deathbed a gospel of struggle and endurance in which a troubled echo of the great strain of Ben Ezra may no doubt be heard; but his career is, as a whole, a half-sad, half-humorous commentary on the vainness of striving to extend the iron frontiers of mortality.”

  Robert Browning

• “His was a curious temperament, and this sentimentality, born of vainness and idle hours, by no means expressed it all.”

  Lysbeth, a Tale of the Dutch

• “The vainness of self-worship, and the waste of life.”

  Alcyone

• “Among the Carmelites are rich and pretty women who have lived in the world and left it, wholly convinced of the vainness of its joys; and these nuns, who evidently know nothing, have had an intuition of that vacuity which it has needed years of experience for the others to gain.”

  En Route

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