"No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity."
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Vanity quotes
Vanity
952 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Vanity quotes (page 6 of 48)
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"It is much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity."
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"He who commends the nature of the soul as the supreme good, and condemns the nature of the flesh as evil, at once both carnally desires the soul, and carnally flies the flesh, because he feels thus from human vanity, not from divine truth."
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"The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it."
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"Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency."
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"As regards this vice, we read that the peacock is more guilty of it than any other animal. For it is always contemplating the beauty of its tail, which it spreads in the form of a wheel, and by its cries attracts to itself the gaze of the creatures that surround it. And this is the last vice to be conquered."
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"Provided a man is not mad, he can be cured of every folly but vanity."
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"How vain, without the merit, is the name."
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"Vanity asks, is it popular? Politics ask, will it work? But conscience and morality ask, is it right?"
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"The alchemists spent years in their laboratories, observing the fire that purified the metals. They spent so much time close to the fire that gradually they gave up the vanities of the world. They discovered that the purification of the metals had led to a purification of themselves."
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"The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself - not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly."
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"Greater mischief happens often from folly, meanness, and vanity than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition."
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"Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they have of it themselves."
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"I have not the hope of being immortal, because the desire of it has not given me that vanity."
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"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."
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"What a strange vanity painting is; it attracts admiration by resembling the original, we do not admire."
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"Curiosity is nothing more than vanity. More often than not we only seek knowledge to show it off."
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"We are so presumptuous that we wish to be known to all the world, even to those who come after us; and we are so vain that the esteem of five or six persons immediately around us is enough to amuse and satisfy us."
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"The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth."
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"How heroic to be able to suppress one's vanity to the extent of confessing that the game is too hard."
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