quotations about vanity
There is more jealousy between rival wits, than rival beauties, for vanity has no sex.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
A man that is deeply in love with himself will probably succeed in his suit owing to a lack of rivals.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
V is for vanity, every time I look at me
I turn myself on, yeah
CHRISTINA AGUILERA
"Vanity"
There's just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It's not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it's that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don't see what you wish to see--or glimpse something that you wish weren't there.
DEAN KOONTZ
Deeply Odd
Vanity is a confounded donkey, very apt to put his head between his legs and chuck us over.
FREDERICK MARRYAT
attributed, Day's Collacon
Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
Vanity's a confounded donkey, very apt to put his head between his legs and chuck us over; but Pride's a fine horse, who will carry us over the ground, and enable us to distance our fellow travelers.... How often have you read of people rising from nothing, and becoming great men? This was from talent, sure enough; but it was talent with pride to force it onward, not talent with vanity to check it.
FREDERICK MARRYAT
Peter Simple
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.
WILLIAM KELLY
Lectures Introductory to the Study of the Minor Prophets
Vanity is often so excessive, that those who are compelled to walk on crutches would fain make us believe they are raised on stilts.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Everywhere you find the man of thews and sinews who toils, and the lymphatic man who torments himself; and pleasures are everywhere the same, for when all sensations are exhausted, all that survives is Vanity--Vanity is the abiding substance of us, the I in us.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
Notes from Underground
Once scorned as an affliction of the overly self-involved, vanity is lately being embraced as a novel kind of positive reinforcement to encourage healthier lifestyles. Researchers are finding that healthy versions of vanity can help us adapt and adhere to better diets, more rigorous skin-care routines, and regular exercise--the kinds of preventive health measures that may have a lasting impact on one's life span.
VALLI HERMAN
"Why Vanity Is Good for You", Robb Report, February 23, 2017
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.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
If vanity does not overthrow all virtues, at least she makes them totter.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Alas for human nature, that the wounds of vanity should smart and bleed so much longer than the wounds of affection!
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
Essays and Lays of Ancient Rome
False modesty is the last refinement of vanity.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
attributed, Day's Collacon
The tyrant is a child of Pride
Who drinks from his sickening cup
Recklessness and vanity,
Until from his high crest headlong
He plummets to the dust of hope.
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus Rex
Vanity is not a happy life. It is one marked by masks, facades, manipulation, false worship, and an insatiable desire for attention that makes the entire world a stage with only one spotlight for ourselves.
JEFFREY F. KIRBY
"In Lent, beware of vanity that always tries to canonize itself", CRUX, March 19, 2017
A man's vanity is more fragile that you might think. It's easy for us to mistake shyness for coldness, and silence for indifference.
LISA KLEYPAS
Devil in Winter
It is our own vanity that makes the vanity of others intolerable to us.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Maxims