I mean sir, in delay We waste our lights in vain, light lights by day.
— from Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

the philosophy of a lacquey can go; I believe that all gaity in that state of life is very doubtful indeed.
— from Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims by François duc de La Rochefoucauld

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 % of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
— from Ulysses by James Joyce

Despite its incessant and multifarious activities, one looks in vain for the hospital, the orphan asylum, the home for elderly men or women or aged couples, or the asylum for the insane, and much less, for that vast and complicated system of organized charities, which, even amid our material greed of gain, make cities like New York, or London, or Chicago, so beautiful from the point of view of humanity.
— from The Religions of Japan, from the Dawn of History to the Era of Méiji by William Elliot Griffis

But for my deep-seated impressions that treasure was here somewhere actually buried, we might have had all our labor in vain.”
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 1 by Edgar Allan Poe

In delay / We waste our lights in vain, like lamps by day.
— from Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources Including Phrases, Mottoes, Maxims, Proverbs, Definitions, Aphorisms, and Sayings of Wise Men, in Their Bearing on Life, Literature, Speculation, Science, Art, Religion, and Morals, Especially in the Modern Aspects of Them by Wood, James, Rev.

But the others labour in vain; for the mortal steed, if he has not been properly trained, keeps them down and sinks them towards the earth.
— from Phaedrus by Plato

She doesn’t speak or laugh, is very nice-looking, and as pure as snow; truly no ordinary girl.”
— from Myths and Legends of China by E. T. C. (Edward Theodore Chalmers) Werner

SHE shall not soon forget the occurrences of this day; she shall find that she has poured forth her tender tale of love in vain, and exposed herself for ever to the contempt of the whole world, and the severest resentment of her injured mother.
— from Lady Susan by Jane Austen

Ten species of ophidia are known in the Japanese islands, but in the larger number of more or less imaginary varieties which figure in the ancient books we shall find plenty of material for fetich-worship.
— from The Religions of Japan, from the Dawn of History to the Era of Méiji by William Elliot Griffis

It is, however, of little independent value as a witness to the text.
— from The Last Poems of Ovid by Ovid

And from the watchful star above— The dwelling of a spirit fled— That faithful sentinel of love Its vacant shrine surveyed, And knew, through all transition seen, Its place and habitation dear, Still waiting, in the throb of hope, Its resurrection here.
— from Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, September, 1878 by Various

"Yes, I have one like it; very like it; so like it that yesterday I could not suppress an exclamation on seeing this one." "Where did you get the one you have?
— from The Filigree Ball Being a full and true account of the solution of the mystery concerning the Jeffrey-Moore affair by Anna Katharine Green

Their enjoyment of life is very brief indeed; the male moth dies within twenty hours of its birth; the female is then placed on fine linen rags, where, in the course of the day it will deposit from 100 to 500 eggs, which are left in the air for a short time, and then put into linen bags and hung from the beam in the centre of the house, or sent to the mountain to await another year.
— from The Thistle and the Cedar of Lebanon by Habeeb Risk Allah

The roll of Plymouth's naval heroes begins with the Hawkins family, and one looks in vain in modern Plymouth for some statue to commemorate the most illustrious of her sons.
— from A Book of the West. Volume 1: Devon Being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall by S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould

One looks in vain for traces of spirituality in the Dean.
— from Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 01 Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great by Elbert Hubbard

As years went past and successive editions of the book appeared, the battle of land ice versus floating ice may be said to have been definitely closed; and James Geikie’s name as an expounder of glacial geology came to be more and more closely associated with his views on the glacial succession (the question, that is, whether there was only one epoch of glaciation, or several epochs separated by periods in which the climate was much milder).
— from James Geikie, the Man and the Geologist by Marion I. (Marion Isabel) Newbigin

Rabbits sprang up in the scrub and went before them like the wind, and as each one leaped into view and laid back his ears in flight, the cries and laughter grew and the singing rose louder.
— from The Basket Woman: A Book of Indian Tales for Children by Mary Hunter Austin

And the wisdom which is to mould our lives in view of these outsiders will “discern both time and judgment,” will try to take the measure of men and act accordingly.
— from The Expositor's Bible: The Epistles of St. Paul to the Colossians and Philemon by Alexander Maclaren