Vanity Quotes

She seemed to be lovely still to herself, as if no amount of looking into mirrors could ruin her illusion.

~ Elizabeth Taylor

I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.

~ Bertrand Russell

Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It’s a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is.

~ Dennis Lehane

My vanity suggested I should take offense, but the deeper part of me was relieved- relieved that he was noble enough to want to make such a sacrifice from his heart rather than from his desire to impress me.

~ Jody Hedlund

The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.

~ Eric Hoffer

Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.

~ Jane Austen

Mirrors are dangerous things. They can just as easily tell us what we don't like as what we do. Yet in truth you can't tell anything from a reflection, as a reflection is actually empty.

~ Susie Staplehurst

Robert Ashford possessed one of the key character flaws necessary to a traitor. He thought he was smarter than everyone else. This allowed the overeducated career bureaucrat to sell out his own country, because he believed he knew what was best for his nation and its people.

~ Brad Thor

If I'd been born ugly, you'd never have heard of Pelé.

~ George Best

What's the matter with you, Penny? You're not as good looking as you generally believe you are.

~ L.m. Montgomery

What if this is a horrible mistake? I croaked. Oh, it'll be horrible fine, just a bunch of pretentious rich people with shelves of expensive books they've never read.

~ Ruta Sepetys

Admiring and a little overwhelmed by the simple opulence of the limousine’s interior, she shook snowflakes from her scarf and tresses, hoping the rare effort she had put into doing her hair was not entirely r

~ Roberta Pearce

Even eighty-odd is sometimes vulnerable to vanity.

~ L.m. Montgomery

For as love is oftentimes won with beauty, so it is not kept, preserved, and continued, but by virtue and obedience.

~ Thomas More

One of the characters in our story, Gavril Ardalionovitch Ivolgin, belonged to the other category; he belonged to the category of much cleverer people; though head to toe he was infected with the desire to be original. But this class of person, as we have observed above, is far less happy than the first. The difficulty is that the intelligent ordinary man, even if he does imagine himself at times (and perhaps all his life) a person of genius and originality, nevertheless retains within his heart a little worm of doubt, which sometimes leads the intelligent man in the end to absolute despair. If he does yield in this belief, he is still completely poisoned with inward-driven vanity.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The false face had been handsome, yes, but consciously so. As though he was too aware of his own attractivensss, something she found distinctly unappealing.

~ Erin Morgenstern

Vanity and superficiality, placed deliberately on display, can be a burden; take this nonsense overboard.

~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Agatha: If you say anything smug or stuck-up or shallow, I'll have Reaper follow you home.Sophie: But then I can't talk!

~ Soman Chainani

If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honourable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth; we should not in the least care whether the truth proved to be in favour of the opinion which we had begun by expressing, or of the opinion of our adversary. That we should regard as a matter of no moment, or, at any rate, of very secondary consequence; but, as things are, it is the main concern. Our innate vanity, which is particularly sensitive in reference to our intellectual powers, will not suffer us to allow that our first position was wrong and our adversary’s right. The way out of this difficulty would be simply to take the trouble always to form a correct judgment. For this a man would have to think before he spoke. But, with most men, innate vanity is accompanied by loquacity and innate dishonesty. They speak before they think; and even though they may afterwards perceive that they are wrong, and that what they assert is false, they want it to seem thecontrary. The interest in truth, which may be presumed to have been their only motive when they stated the proposition alleged to be true, now gives way to the interests of vanity: and so, for the sake of vanity, what is true must seem false, and what is false must seem true.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

It would be a great mistake to suppose that it is sufficient not to become personal yourself. For by showing a man quite quietly that he is wrong, and that what he says and thinks is incorrect — a process which occurs in every dialectical victory — you embitter him more than if you used some rude or insulting expression. Why is this? Because, as Hobbes observes, all mental pleasure consists in being able to compare oneself with others to one’s own advantage. — Nothing is of greater moment to a man than the gratification of his vanity, and no wound is more painful than that which is inflicted on it. Hence such phrases as “Death before dishonour,” and so on.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

If I really seem vain, it is that I am only vain in my ways—not in my heart. The worst women are those vain in their hearts, and not in their ways.

~ Thomas Hardy

She was the most alone person he had ever met - so intent on staying forever breathtaking that she could never let any of life's glories take her own breath away.

~ Jenny Wingfield

Those who seek enjoyment in life are the ones that think that the world is a playground.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

All success in life comes to naught if it is laced with vanity.

~ Andy Paula

Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken, themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

~ Samuel Johnson

Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth; and, at fifty-four, was still a very fine man. Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did; nor could the valet of any new-made lord be more delighted with the place he held in society. He considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliot, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion.

~ Jane Austen

The World will give you hopeless vanity, but what will you give the World?

~ Jennifer Megan Varnadore

The Rose does not preen herself to catch my eye. She blooms because she blooms. A saint is a saint until he knows he is one.

~ Anthony De Mello

But the vain man did not hear him. Vain men never hear anything but praise.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

I believe the secret of the success of psychoanalysis resides in people's vanity.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

He wil sooner lose his best friend, then his least jest.

~ Ben Jonson

My intellect was my greatest vanity.

~ Dan Simmons

I cried because I was so beautiful.

~ Victoria Kann

Mirror Mirror on the Wall,Who's fairest of them all?I'm Mona Lisa and She is plain,But the truth is - we all are Vain.

~ Saru Singhal

But I feel vanity is a part of art and the non-vain are really non-artistic.

~ Barry Webster

It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch one another and find sympathy. We differ widely enough in our nobler qualities. It is in our follies that we are at one.

~ Jerome K. Jerome

Hairspray and blusher, eyelash curlers, eye-shadow palettes the size of tea-trays. Even before they left school it was as if they were already rehearsing for some witless kind of womanhood.

~ Alison Fell

How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?

~ Christopher Hitchens

In their vanity men focus on what they wish to hear and miss the hidden meaning, the lurking threat.

~ David Hewson

But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less ready shall we be to make use of the word ‘artificial.’ Nothing in the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many works of art are branded with artificiality because the exhibit vanity and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a voice out of the abyss.

~ G.k. Chesterton