Vanity Quotes

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...

~ Georges Mongrédien

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.

~ Robert Schumann

Time and time over it is the ones who try a little too hard to be innovative rebels - and for the sheer glory of being considered innovative rebels - who then turn out not quite as innovative or as rebellious as they would like to think they are.

~ Criss Jami

It is naturally given to all men to esteem their own inventions best.

~ Thomas More

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 calls its history world history!--Vanitas vanitatum homo.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

...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.

~ Henry Fielding

Beware of puny two-legged creatures claiming to be made in the image of God.

~ Marty Rubin

And then one day you realise that if you want to be rich, you'd have to give away almost everything you own.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Work was intended not to give a man a reason to live, but rather to give him a means to live.

~ Criss Jami

The problem is politics is made a sport, almost as much a sport as football or baseball. When it comes to politics, adults and politicians do more finger-pointing and play more games than children ever do. Too often are we rooting for the pride of a team rather than the good of the nation.

~ Criss Jami

A great person defines himself, an average person defines others.

~ Debasish Mridha

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.

~ François Fénelon

It is in the nature of man to want what he does not have. This modern concern for happiness seems a real testimony of its absence.

~ Criss Jami

Conflicting egos destroy many relationships. Lasting, stable marriages are a true treasure because they demand that both parties adjust to the constant cellular flux of their partner as they metaphase through changing seasons of life.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

He knows how to market himself well. Nowadays, that's all that seems to count. He's rebellious in a way that appeals to people with vain, shallow taste. So of course he manipulates his audiences with the blessing of his recording company and the financial investors behind his brand.

~ Jess C. Scott

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, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last; a long way leading nowhere. Only one drawback; proud people are intolerably selfish, and the vain are gentle and giving.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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!

~ Eliza Parsons

Beware of those who are too focused with polishing and beautifying their outer shells. They lack true substance to understand that genuine beauty is reflected from the heart that resides inside.

~ Suzy Kassem

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.

~ Jane Austen

Pretentiousness isn't always just big words and meaningless jargon, but also pretty words that either when put into action don't mean beans or hurt you in the long run. Oftentimes, the former appeals to the intellect whereas the latter appeals to the heart.

~ Criss Jami

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.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

The vanities of life:pleasure, possession, position and power.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The vanity of Eve, that desire to exercise power, to seduce, to drag down!

~ Dorothy Day

False humility is quite like the worst of both worlds: both that of Meekness and that of Conceit.

~ Criss Jami

People who worship only themselves get a slick, polished look -- like monuments. Too bad they had to go so soon.

~ Vanna Bonta

Only a demon would prevent a person from saving lives or fulfilling their life mission. There is no reasoning with the devil. Stand with pride because your heart is filled with the goodness of helping others, while theirs is filled with helping themselves.

~ Shannon L. Alder

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 self.The scholar and the world! The endless strife,The discord in the harmonies of life!The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,And all the sweet serenity of books;The market-place, the eager love of gain,Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain!

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A utopian system, when established by men, is likely to be synonymous with a dystopian depression. The only way for perfect peace by man is absolute control of all wrongs. Bully-cultures find this: with each and every mistake, another village idiot is shamed into nothingness and mindlessly shut down by the herd. This is a superficial peace made by force and by fear, one in which there is no freedom to breathe; and the reason it is impossible for man to maintain freedom and peace for everyone at the same time. Christ, on the other hand, transforms, instead of controls, by instilling his certain inner peace. This is the place where one realizes that only his holiness is and feels like true freedom, rather than like imprisonment, and, too, why Hell, I imagine, a magnified version of man's never-ending conflict between freedom and peace, would be the flesh's ultimate utopia - yet its ultimate regret.

~ Criss Jami

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 penetrating through it, so you can see it for what it is!This should be your practice throughout all your life: when things have such a plausible appearance, show them naked, see their shoddiness, strip away their own boastful account of themselves.Vanity is the greatest seducer of reason: when you are most convinced that your work is important, that is when you are most under its spell.

~ Marcus Aurelius

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.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I am afraid of those who are too simple on the outside, for their vanities they wear upon their hearts. Better to meet a person who wears their vanities out in the open where you can see them! Than one who hides them in their hearts! For it is the stuff of the heart that is hidden, while the stuff on the outside is not. And we are all vain, the difference is where we put it! I would rather meet a person vain on the outside, while possessing the simplest of hearts.

~ C. Joybell C.

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 expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there smiling.

~ Virginia Woolf

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.

~ Tiffany Madison

It's all about vanity, isn't it? I think it says something about people if they can't do it

~ Gwendoline Riley

...most systems end up by making imagined humility into a form of vanity, so they end up with vanity just the same.

~ Idries Shah

Premature independence is the daughter of conceit.

~ Idries Shah

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.

~ John Myer

Vanity remains a feeble weaponThe delusional wearer of it considers herself strong

~ Sreesha Divakaran

What men classify as living is often but the discontentment of making oneself itch just to enjoy the scratch.

~ Criss Jami

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.

~ Osamu Dazai