Quotes About Vanity

Vanity, in a fairy tale, will make you evil. Vanity in the real world will drive you nuts. Vanity makes you say things like “I deserved a better life than this.

The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that's laughable is vanity.

I should have been, I don't know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.

Vanity is the poison of agreeableness; yet as poison, when artfully and properly applied, has a salutary effect in medicine, so has vanity in the commerce and society of the world.

... overconfidence in one's own ability is the root of much evil. Vanity, egoism, is the deadliest of all characteristics. This vanity, combined with extreme ignorance of conditions the knowledge of which is the very A B C of business and of life, produces more shipwrecks and heartaches than any other part of our mental make-up.

I'm not only uninterested in having children. I am opposed to having children. Having a purebred human baby is like having a purebred dog; it is nothing but vanity, human vanity.

Pride is an established conviction of one’s own paramount worth in some particular respect, while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others, and it is generally accompanied by the secret hope of ultimately coming to the same conviction oneself. Pride works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.

Vanity and pride of nations; vanity is as advantageous to a government as pride is dangerous.

I'd known the people at Rolling Stone for a while. I'd gone to them with a piece I'd done on Beirut for Vanity Fair that Vanity Fair didn't want to publish, because they said I was making fun of death... This was Tina Brown.But they paid me for it. So I've got this big chunk of a piece, and Rolling Stone liked it, but they thought it was a little dated. But then they called me back and asked me to do a similar piece about the Turks and Caicos Islands, where the whole government had been arrested for dope smuggling. That was fun.

Vanity well fed is benevolent. Vanity hungry is spiteful.

The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.

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 Elliott, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion.

Pride... is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or the other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.

The common people feel themselves oppressed by the grasping of some, and their vanity is flattered by others. Fired with evil passions, they are no longer willing to submit to control, but demand that everything be subject to their authority. The invariable result is that government assumes the noble names of free and popular, but becomes in fact the most execrable thing, mob rule.

The only sure way of avoiding these evils [vanity and boasting] is never to speak of yourself at all. But when, historically, youare obliged to mention yourself, take care not to drop one single word that can directly or indirectly be construed as fishing for applause.

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

If any one phrase could gather its (religion's) universal message, that phrase would be, - All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.

Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat; it turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self-denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love.

I see a funny guy who's imperfect, but has a great heart and no vanity when it comes to what he'll do to get a laugh. I see a guy who loves his art and loves his family, and who is willing to live and die for both.

The most violent passions sometimes leave us at rest, but vanity agitates us constantly.

She gave up beauty in her tender youth, gave all her hope and joy and pleasant ways; she covered up her eyes lest they should gaze on vanity, and chose the bitter truth.

To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them, and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations. . . . For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination.

I write a lot, poems and such, and when I look at it the next day, I can analyze what the problem is and find the solution. It's the same when I watch myself on the big screen, but first, my vanity has to go away and so I have to watch it ten times. But when it has gone, and I don't think my nose is too big and everything else, then I start analyzing, and I think it helps me to become a better person.

Pride is a wound and vanity is the scab on it. One's life picks at the scab to open that wound again and again. Among men it seldom heals and often grows septic.

…the samurai ethic is a political science of the heart, designed to control such discouragement and fatigue in order to avoid showing them to others. It was thought more important to look healthy than to be healthy, and more important to seem bold and daring than to be so. This view of morality, since it is physiologically based on the special vanity peculiar to men, is perhaps the supreme male view of morality.

Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn't do to upset one's own vanity.

Self-improvement is a dangerous form of vanity.

What renders other people's vanity insufferable is that it wounds our own.

Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.

The vanity of man revolts from the serene indifference of the cat.

The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.

That little hypocrites and half-crazed people dare to imagine that on their account the laws of nature are constantly broken; such an enhancement of every kind of selfishness to infinity, to impudence, cannot be branded with sufficient contempt. And yet Christianity owes its triumph to this pitiable flattery of personal vanity.

There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity; nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.

Every noble action is selfish. Some selfish actions are nobler than others. But they are all selfish. And as such there can be no action purely noble anyway. Even the nobility in God's great philosophical intentions is bounded by his vanity.

He had only one vanity; he thought he could give advice better than any other person.

Perhaps the seeds of false-refinement, immorality, and vanity, have ever been shed by the great. Weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and defections of their race, in a premature and unnatural manner, undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society!

In my more pompous moments I like to think of myself as a writer rather than a humorist, but I suppose that's merely the vanity of advancing age.

I have not the capability to give you my loyalty, nor do I have the vanity to appear as if I did.

It is difficult to divest one's self of vanity; because impossible to divest one's self of self-love.

Nobody sets out to make a bad film, but so many of those compromises are made and often they're made because of vanity, pride and ego.

Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

As long as somebody is guaranteed a certain number of sales you know you're gonna keep seeing these vanity projects. I mean they have a place, they serve a function they can bring people into comics.

A good deal of philanthropy arises in general from mere vanity and love of distinction gilded over to others and to themselves with some show of benevolent sentiment.

Flattery is a base coin which is current only through our vanity.

Without that poise and balance and gentle humor and caring sense, nothing happens at all. It's just egotism and vanity and jealousy and possessiveness.

When men will not be reasoned out of a vanity, they must be ridiculed out of it.

There is more jealousy between rival wits than rival beauties, for vanity has no sex. But in both cases there must be pretensions, or there will be no jealousy.

The vanity of human life is like a river, constantly passing away, and yet constantly coming on.