Vanity quotes
952 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside vanity — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"We are so presumptuous that we should like to be known all over the world, even by people who will only come when we are no more. Such is our vanity that the good opinion of half a dozen of the people around us gives us pleasure and satisfaction."
"I've done films where you have to get in shape for purely vanity reasons, when you read a script, turn to page 87 and it says: "Rips his shirt off and casually throws it onto chair" - and you're going to go to the gym the next day because nobody wants to see your big fat arse out there taking your shirt off!"
"The anxiety we have for the figure we cut, for our personage, is constantly cropping out. We are showing off and are often more concerned with making a display than with living. Whoever feels observed observes himself."
"For it is a matter of daily observation that people take the greatest pleasure in that which satisfies their vanity; and vanity cannot be satisfied without comparison with others."
"Pride works _from within_; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without."
"Everything - our houses, our clothes, our hairstyles - is meant to help us forget ourselves and to protect us from vanity, greed and envy, which are just forms of selfishness. If we have little, and want for little, and we are all equal, we envy no one."
"Vain-glorious men are the scorn of the wise, the admiration of fools, the idols of paradise, and the slaves of their own vaunts."
"People are more slanderous from vanity than from malice."
"What renders other people's vanity insufferable is that it wounds our own."
"Vanity, shame, and above all disposition, often make men brave and women chaste."
"The most effectual way to be deceived is to believe oneself more cunning than one's neighbors."
"Either you are so underdeveloped that you can't see all that you can do, or you won't sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it."
"He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him."
"What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?"
"Vanity is the fear of appearing original: it is thus a lack of pride, but not necessarily a lack of originality."
"Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart--and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit."
"He who is usually self-sufficient becomes exceptionally vain and keenly alive to fame and praise when he is physically ill. The more he loses himself the more he has to endeavor to regain his position by means of the opinion of others."
"The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing."
"Ecclesiastes said that "all is vanity," Most modern preachers say the same, or show it By their examples of true Christianity: In short, all know, or very short may know it."
"The near touch of death may be a release into life; if only it will break the egoistic will, and release that other flow."
