Quotes about vanity
Pauline Seaport -
I never want to be the type of person remembered for vanity or materialism only by the content of my true character that comes from within.
T. William Watts -
Vanity breeds insanity humility leads to utility.
Criss Jami - Healology
Trends are about as fickle as the direction of the wind as are the legacies of those who flow with them.
Robert Littell - The Amateur
Cole was meticulous to a fault office scuttlebut had it that he never went out in public without first having his shoelaces ironed.
Eric Hoffer -
Naivete in grownups is often charming but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Hilary Weeks -
Don't worry about what others think about you worry about what they think of themselves when they're with you.
Matthew Macfadyen -
My vanity is I'm terribly romantic! But being married is lovely.
Jean de la Bruyere -
Men blush less for their crimes than for their weaknesses and vanity.
Kedar Joshi -
I am philosophical Christ crucified on the cross of ignorance for the sake ofdivine vanity.
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night & The Last Tycoon
If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.
Diana Wynne Jones - Howl's Moving Castle
Look. Survey. Inspect. My hair is ruined! I look like a pan of bacon and eggs!
Jim Butcher - Grave Peril
I'm amazing and studly, but I have limits.
Jim Butcher - Dead Beat
I'm so pretty, it's hard for me to think of myself as intelligent.
William Makepeace Thackeray - Vanity Fair
Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?
Anthony T. Hincks -
Vanity is man's love affair with himself.
Francine Rivers - An Echo in the Darkness
Were you there?”She shook her head. “No. I was here in Nain having achild.”“Then why do you weep as though you had part in hiscrucifixion? You had no part in it.”“I’d like nothing better than to think I would haveremained faithful. But if those closest to him—hisdisciples, his own brothers—turned away, who am I tothink I’m better than they and would have donedifferently? No, Marcus. We all wanted what wewanted, and when the Lord fulfilled his purpose ratherthan ours, we struck out against him. L
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Idiot
Why did you come in to-night with your heads in the air? 'Make way, we are coming! Give us every right and don't you dare breathe a word before us. Pay us every sort of respect, such as no one's ever heard of, and we shall treat you worse than the lowest lackey!' They strive for justice, they stand on their rights, and yet they've slandered him like infidels in their article. We demand, we don't ask, and you will get no gratitude from us, because you are acting for the satisfaction of your own c
Lailah Gifty Akita -
If you reflect on death, you find the vanity of life.
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.
Tennessee Williams -
Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare
Karen Quan - Write like no one is reading 2
How beautiful would it be if we could just see souls instead of bodies? To see love and compassion instead of curves.
Eudora Welty - On Writing
I didn't hit other people or hit purposefully, I just hit. Some object would be at fault. My anger was at myself, every time, all vanity. As an adolescent I was a slammer of drawers and a packer of suitcases. I was responsible for scenes.Control came imperfectly to all of us: we reached it at different times of life, frustrated, shot into indignation, by different things - some that are grown out of, and others not.Of all my strong emotions, anger is the one least responsible for any of my work.
Dee Remy - There Once Was A Boy
When you are in a room with Kurtis, whether its one or a hundred he is the only person that matters.
Dee Remy - There Once Was A Boy
Every men wanted to be his friend and every woman wanted to be in his bed
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.
William Kelly -
That which attracts the world must please and pander to the self-importance of man. The world itself is a vain show, and likes its own. Consequently there is nothing which so carries the mass of men along with it as that which flatters the vanity of the human mind. It may assume the lowliest air, but sinful man seeks his own honour and present exaltation.
Arthur Schopenhauer - Parerga and Paralipomena
Very often inertia, selfishness, and vanity play the greatest role in our trust in others; inertia when we prefer to trust somebody else, in order not to investigate, be vigilant, or act ourselves; selfishness when the desire to speak about our own affairs tempts us to confide in someone else; vanity when it concers something that we are proud of.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer -
Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.
Jason Versey - A Walk with Prudence
If we want to live perfectly happy lives...we must drive out selfish character tendencies such as pride, ego, vanity, jealousy, lusts, envy and worry. When we learn to live selflessly, putting others before ourselves, committing to what is noble, right and good; treating others with love and compassion...that's when true happiness is experienced. A genuine focus on selflessness cures all and creates an environment for true growth. It's the secret to every great relationship. We gain...when we gi
Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls
Professing not to care is a primordial defense mechanism. Whenever a person finds oneself mired in failure and despondency, rebelling is a viable option to preserve false personal pride.
Criss Jami - Killosophy
Yes, be different, but not for the vanities of being different.
Allan Lokos - Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living
No one looks or feels attractive when angry.
Robert Black -
Vanity does not pay the bills.
Sándor Márai - Embers
It’s the moment when something happens not just deep among the trees but also in the dark interior of the human heart, for the heart, too, has its night and its wild surges, as strong an instinct for the hunt as a wolf or a stag. The human night is filled with the crouching forms of dreams, desires, vanities, self-interest, mad love, envy, and the thirst for revenge, as the desert night conceals the puma, the hawk and the jackal.
Sunday Adelaja -
The world is full of vanities
Leonardo da Vinci - Thoughts on Art and Life
Nothing should be so greatly feared as empty fame.
Sunday Adelaja -
No one was created in vain
Lailah Gifty Akita -
The chase of the whirlwind is vanity.
Friedrich Nietzsche - A Nietzsche Reader
Without the errors which are active in every psychical pleasure and displeasrue a humanity would never have come into existence--whose fundamental feeling is and remains that man is the free being in a world of unfreedom, the external miracle worker whether he does good or ill, the astonishing exception, the superbeast and almost-god, the meaning of creation which cannot be thought away, the solution of the cosmic riddle, the mighty ruler over nature and the despiser of it, the creature which ca
Henry Fielding - Joseph Andrews
...the pleasures of the world are chiefly folly, and the business of it mostly knavery, and both nothing better than vanity; the men of pleasure tearing one another to pieces from the emulation of spending money, and the men of business from envy in getting it.
Thomas More -
It is naturally given to all men to esteem their own inventions best.
Marty Rubin -
Beware of puny two-legged creatures claiming to be made in the image of God.
Heather Crews - Prince of Misery
Beauty was all I’d ever cared for. It was all that ever moved me.
Esther Dalseno - Drown
Thus the little mermaid learned her world’s greatest paradox: that their currency was beauty, and their coin was body parts.
John Cassian - Making Life a Prayer: Selected Writings
Let us not believe that an external fast from visible food alone can possibly be sufficient for perfection of heart and purity of body unless with it there has also been united a fast of the soul. For the soul also has its foods that are harmful. Slander is its food and indeed one that is very dear to it. A burst of anger also supplies it with miserable food for an hour and destroys it as well with its deadly savor. Envy is food of the mind, corrupting it with its poisonous juices and never ceas
Camron Wright - Serann and the Prince of Angkor: A Cambodian Cinderella Story
The vain woman spent fortunes seeking out astrologers, sorcerers, and magicians who would concoct spells and potions to preserve her beauty and help her remain looking young--but envy is hard to cover.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!
Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist
The alchemist picked up a book that someone in the caravan had brought. Leafing through the pages, he found a story about Narcissus.The alchemist knew the legend of Narcissus, a youth who knelt daily beside a lake to contemplate his own beauty. He was so fascinated by himself that, one morning, he fell into the lake and drowned. At the spot where he fell, a flower was born, which was called the narcissus.But this was not how the author of the book ended the story.He said that when Narcissus died
Meljean Brook - Demon Moon
She trailed after him, admiring the line of his back. He began climbing the stairs, and she sighed with pleasure. Every bit of him was gorgeous. “Do you mind if I objectify you?”“Please do,” he said over his shoulder. “Particularly my knees, as they are oft-neglected.”“Maybe if you ever got your pants off, they wouldn’t be.”“It hardly matters, sweet; once they’ve come off, the attention isn’t likely to center on my absurdly handsome knees.
Leo Tolstoy -
I felt how much better and more dignified it was for me to show off the finer side of my soul than of my body.
Ambrose Bierce -
You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.
Margaret Atwood - Cat's Eye
Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.
Georges Mongrédien - La Vie Quotidienne sous Louis XIV
Ainsi dans le faste ostenstatoire d'une dernière cérémonie, le bourgeois, laissant à ses fils un héritage plus riche que celui qu'il a reçu de son père, quite ce monde où il a conu au moins deux grands sources de joie, la fortune et la vanité...Thus in the ostentatious pomp of a last ceremony, the bourgeois, leaving his sons a richer heritage than he has received from his own father, departs from this world where he has known at least two great sources of joy, the fortune and the vanity...
Robert Schumann -
You will be most readily cured of vanity or presumption by studying the history of music, and by hearing the master pieces which have been produced at different periods.
Walter Kirn -
@bobbybaird i'm a writer, so are you. we try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. vain of us? a bit.
David Foster Wallace - Both Flesh and Not: Essays
You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing— your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.
Tiffany Madison -
Women that can work a camera with ease often work men just as effortlessly for both require the same commitment to vanity and manipulation.
Dale Carnegie - How to Win Friends and Influence People
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.
J. P. Vinluca - Aiko and the Dragon
Foolish men always believe that a little knowledge will give them control over the world, but it is no more than a display of their vanity.
Anthony T. Hincks -
An excerpt from:“Hypothetically Speaking”ByAnthony T. Hincks(A book about you and the world – coming soon!)If I was a savvy person, I would watch, and study mankind in order to find out where his weaknesses lay.Greed, for sure; vanity; mistrust; a tendency towards violence; fanaticism, and many other less than honorable traits and even some honorable ones which could also be used, and capitalized on.Then, once I had found his weaknesses I would act.I and some friends or family, not terms that I
Eraldo Banovac -
A man's vanity often goes hand in hand with his lack of knowledge.
Empedocles -
Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil; then are they borne away, like smoke they vanish into air, and what they dream they know is but the little each hath stumbled on in wandering about the world; yet boast they all that they have learned the whole—vain fools! for what that is, no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it be conceived by min
Lailah Gifty Akita -
We must turn from worthless things towards faith in God.
William Makepeace Thackeray - Esq. written by himself
It was in the reign of George II. that the above-named personages lived and quarrelled ; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now
Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America Volume 2
Amongst democratic nations men easily attain a certain equality of conditions: they can never attain the equality they desire. It perpetually retires from before them, yet without hiding itself from their sight, and in retiring draws them on. At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights they die.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - The Conduct of Life
The virtues are economists, but some of the vices are also...Pride is handsome, economical; pride eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride. Pride can go without domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house with two rooms, can eat potato, purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil, can travel afoot, can talk with poor men, or sit silent well contented in fine saloons. But vanity costs money, labo
Eliza Parsons - The Girl of the Mountains
Vain mistaken mortals, who, valuing themselves on names and titles, suppose that the virtues of the mind must be attached to an empty sound, when every day's experience proves that birth is disgraced, titles rendered contemptible, and riches a curse, by the vices, meanness, and dissipation of its possessors!
François Fénelon - Les aventures de Télémaque suivies des aventures d'Aritonoüs
The youth who, like a woman, loves to adorn his person, has renounced all claim to wisdom and to glory; glory is due to those only who dare to associate with pain, and have trampled pleasure under their feet.
Dorothy Day - Therese
The vanity of Eve, that desire to exercise power, to seduce, to drag down!
Vanna Bonta - Degrees: Thought Capsules
People who worship only themselves get a slick, polished look -- like monuments. Too bad they had to go so soon.
Jane Austen -
Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid.
Vironika Tugaleva -
To spend your time trying to make your body flawless is to waste your time. Even if it appears to match some externalized ideals of perfection for a moment, your physical self will wrinkle and age. Work on your mind. Work on your legacy.
Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls
Cockiness – the state subjective or intuitive state of self-assurance – is a sign of ignorance. Maturity comes with encountering the horrible and learning about what a person can withstand.
Marcus Aurelius -
How good it is when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this is the dead body of a bird or pig; and again, that the Falernian wine is the mere juice of grapes, and your purple edged robe simply the hair of a sheep soaked in shell-fish blood!And in sexual intercourse that it is no more than the friction of a membrane and a spurt of mucus ejected. How good these perceptions are at getting to the heart of the real thing and
Idries Shah - Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
Premature independence is the daughter of conceit.
Sreesha Divakaran - Those Imperfect Strokes
Vanity remains a feeble weaponThe delusional wearer of it considers herself strong
John Myer - #1
Only small men parade their learning, talk over their audience and air their superior knowledge. Only brutal men throw their strength about, and vain rich men display their wealth in ostentatious useless luxuries.
Idries Shah - Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
...most systems end up by making imagined humility into a form of vanity, so they end up with vanity just the same.
Gwendoline Riley -
It's all about vanity, isn't it? I think it says something about people if they can't do it
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
There is a code of behavior, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behooves the woman, whatever her own occupation may be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expec
Tiffany Madison -
Never trust someone that claims they care nothing of what society thinks of them. Instead of conquering obstacles, they simply pretend they don't exist.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The writer of this legend then recordsIts ghostly application in these words:The image is the Adversary old,Whose beckoning finger points to realms of gold;Our lusts and passions are the downward stairThat leads the soul from a diviner air;The archer, Death; the flaming jewel, Life;Terrestrial goods, the goblet and the knife;The knights and ladies all whose flesh and boneBy avarice have been hardened into stone;The clerk, the scholar whom the love of pelfTempts from his books and from his nobler
Henry Fielding - Joseph Andrews
...but doth not the person who expends vast sums in the furniture of his house or the ornaments of his person, who consumes much time and employs great pains in dressing himself, or who thinks himself paid for self-denial, labour, or even villany, by a title or a ribbon, sacrifice as much to vanity as the poor wit who is desirous to read you his poem or his play?
Israelmore Ayivor - Dream Big!: See Your Bigger Picture!
Life is how you brew it. Wake up, you have a story to tell. Don't chase vain glory, your story will tell it. You owe it to yourself to write the lines of your story in the ink of purpose!
Osamu Dazai - The Setting Sun
The courageous testimony of Dr. Faust that a maiden's smile is more precious than history, philosophy, education, religion, law, politics,economics, and all the other branches of learning. Learning is another name for vanity. It is the effort of human beings not to be human beings.
C.S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters
He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent... by exploiting his vanity. He can... enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a "deeper," "spiritual" world within
Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker
All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster.
Jason Neville Versey -
Christianity, true Christianity, is experienced when we crucify the anger, pride, vanity and lust that dwells within ourselves and consciously replace it with the sacrificial love, humility, modesty and chasteness of the One who so many profess to believe in and follow. -Jason Neville Versey
Homer -
Man is the vainest of allcreatures that have their being upon earth. As long as heavenvouchsafes him health and strength, he thinks that he shall come tono harm hereafter, and even when the blessed gods bring sorrow uponhim, he bears it as he needs must, and makes the best of it; forGod Almighty gives men their daily minds day by day. I know allabout it, for I was a rich man once, and did much wrong in thestubbornness of my pride, and in the confidence that my father andmy brothers would support
Anthony T. Hincks -
God would never make man in his image,because that would then make him as vain as what man is.
Girdhar Joshi - Some Mistakes Have No Pardon
Things change as minds change. Egos and prides vanish in the darkness of night. The false mask of vanity burns in the natural propensity to be happy. Who wants to be sad, after all?
Sarah Addison Allen - The Girl Who Chased the Moon
Don't be vain. What you look like doesn't matter. It's the deed that matters.
Shannon L. Alder -
True friends are not mirrors where we can always see ourselves reflected in a positive light.
Frank Tallis - A Death in Vienna
We must remember that possession of physical beauty can easily weaken the moral faculty.
Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband's. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn't have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people's standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question "How do
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
Vanity rather than wisdom determines how the world is run.
Albert Camus - The Fall
If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent.