The world is but a show, vain and empty, a mere nothing, bearing the semblance of reality. Set not your affections upon it. [...] Verily I say, the world is like the vapor in a desert, which the thirsty dreameth to be water and striveth after it with all his might, until when he cometh unto it, he findeth it to be mere illusion.

There' s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,
When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay.

Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours;
Our flowers are merely - flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.

This pain, this terrible seeing-through that is in me now. It wasn't necessary. It is all pain, and it buys nothing. Gives birth to nothing.
All in vain. All wasted.
The older the world becomes, the more obvious it is. The bomb and the tortures in Algeria and the starving babies in the Congo. It gets bigger and darker.
More and more suffering for more and more. And more and more in vain.

Let no one who hath
renounced the world think
that he hath given up some
great thing... the whole earth
set over against heavenʼs
infinite is scant and poor

How vain are all these Glories, all our Pains,
Unless good Sense preserve what Beauty gains:
That Men may say, when we the Front-box grace,
Behold the first in Virtue, as in Face!

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity,

Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself. So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future?
But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.

Few are my years, and, yet, I feel
The World was ne’er design’d for me:
Ah! why do dark’ning shades conceal
The hour when man must cease to be?
Once I beheld a splendid dream,
A visionary scene of bliss;
Truth! — wherefore did thy hated beam
Awake me to a world like this?

And as the sun is of no profit to the blind,
so Heaven's light denies its bounty
to the shades in the place of which I speak.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave
Awaits alike the inevitable hour:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Not in the time of pleasure
Hope doth set her bow;
But in the sky of sorrow,
Over the vale of woe.

Through gloom and shadow look we
On beyond the years!
The soul would have no rainbow
Had the eyes no tears.

I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband — I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid — I see these sights on the earth; 5
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny — I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea — I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these — All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.

Then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.