"It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed 'Wisdom.' And then I know exactly what is going to follow: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'"
Read quote
14 likes
Vanity quotes
Vanity
952 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Vanity
Browse quotes that often appear alongside vanity — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Vanity quotes (page 4 of 48)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness."
Read quote
13 likes
"Vanity is my favourite sin."
Read quote
13 likes
"We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own."
Read quote
13 likes
"Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman."
Read quote
13 likes
"Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live."
Read quote
13 likes
"It is in vain that we get upon stilts, for once on them, it is still with our legs that we must walk. And on the highest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own ass."
Read quote
13 likes
"For let us women be never so ill-favored, I imagine that we are always delighted to hear ourselves called handsome."
Read quote
13 likes
"That which is called liberality is frequently nothing more than the vanity of giving."
Read quote
12 likes
"Vanity and narcissism — the compulsive need to be admired and praised — undermine one's courage, for one then fights on someone else's conviction rather than one's own."
Read quote
12 likes
"The highest form of vanity is love of fame."
Read quote
12 likes
"What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity which the most modest possesses when, in the midst of nature and the world, he feels himself to be man!"
Read quote
12 likes
"We love old travelers: we love to hear them prate, drivel and lie; we love them for their asinine vanity, their ability to bore, their luxuriant fertility of imagination, their startling, brilliant, overwhelming mendacity."
Read quote
12 likes
"It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us."
Read quote
12 likes
"I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love."
Read quote
12 likes
"But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown-a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest."
Read quote
11 likes
"What do you believe? I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu. Equally? It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul. Of what would you repent? Nothing. Nothing? One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all."
Read quote
11 likes
"The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. . . Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value."
Read quote
11 likes
"Right now I'm the greatest. I don't say this through vanity. It's just that the rest are so bad."
Read quote
11 likes
"Vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last,--a long way leading nowhere."
Read quote
11 likes