Quotes About Vanity

Why do you beat the air and run in vain? Every occupation has a purpose, obviously. Tell me then, what is the purpose of all the activity of the world? Answer, I challenge you! It is vanity of vanity: all is vanity.

It is better that great peoples should seek out glory, or even vanity, in their deeds, than that they should remain indifferent . For even if they are not incited to act upon virtuous principles, at least there is the saving grace that they will do things they might not have done had not vanity prompted their actions.

It is the vanity of women to spend hours in front of the mirror. It is the vanity of men not to bother.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.

From that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, enunciation, wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be - Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of Man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity - to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

A woman's vanity is interested in making the object of her choice the god of her idolatry.

I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.

Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.

Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.

Men do not take to vanity, because they are taught at an early age that it is wrong to be vain.

We probably have a greater love for those we support than for those who support us. Our vanity carries more weight than our self-interest.

She had been dragged in the most humiliating of all dusts, the dust reserved for older women who let themselves be approached, on amorous lines, by boys... It had all been pure vanity, all just a wish, in these waning days of hers, still to feel power, still to have the assurance of her beauty and its effects.

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.

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 first casualty of hitting rock bottom is vanity.

The person is always happy who is in the presence of something they cannot know in full. A person as advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity.

VANITY, n. The tribute of a fool to the worth of the nearest ass.

He knows which fighters to steal, how to exploit anyone's vice, vanity or insecurity and make a profit for himself.

In judging our progress as individuals we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one's social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education... But internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one's development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others - qualities which are within easy reach of every soul - are the foundation of one's spiritual life.

Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you.

Every actress has to face the facts there are younger, more beautiful girls right behind you. Once you've gone beyond the vanity of the business, you'll take on the tough roles.

Fashion is so close in revealing a person's inner feelings and everybody seems to hate to lay claim to vanity so people tend to push it away. It's really too close to the quick of the soul. Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us. Don't be into trends. Don't make fashion own you, but you decide what you are, what you want to express by the way you dress and the way you live. Fashion should be a form of escapism, and not a form of imprisonment.

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.

It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

It was this feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant. Women knew that a land where men were contented, uncontradicted ans safe in possession of unpunctured vanity was likely to be a very pleasant place for women to live. So, from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration. In fact, men willingly gave ladies everything in the world except credit for having intelligence.

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.

Eternity to a child offers goodness, and eternal life to a man is essentially corrupting because it involves a certain amount of vanity to embrace it.

There are no grades of vanity; there are only grades of ability in concealing it.

There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating... Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.

It is better in some respects to be admired by those with whom you live than to be loved by them; and this not on account of any gratification of vanity, but because admiration is so much more tolerant than love.

I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.

And that is enough to raise your thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex forever will also drown her pride… Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.

Jealousy, in spite of the mad frenzy of its most splendid displays, is a vice of weakness; it arises from a mind whose aspirations and desires are inferior to its accomplishments; it is the child of baulked vanity and failure of courage.

I shall stick to our vow: never, never under any circumstances, to say anything unbecoming of the other...The trouble, of course, is that most successful men are prone to some form of vanity. There comes a stage in their lives when they consider it permissible to be egotistic and to brag to the public at large about their unique achievements.

A man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all the doctrines he holds are true, and all he rejects are false.

False modesty is the masterpiece of vanity: showing the vain man in such an illusory light that he appears in the reputation of the virtue quite opposite to the vice which constitutes his real character; it is a deceit.

I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity.

If you can change style, why stick to one style? Style is a vanity because it gives you product identification.

It is a very high mind to which gratitude is not a painful sensation. If you wish to please, you will find it wiser to receive, solicit even, favors, than accord them; for the vanity of the obligor is always flattered, that of the obligee rarely.

The much-vaunted sex appeal of American women is drawn from films, reviews and pin-ups, and is in large print fictitious. A recent medical survey in the United States showed that 75% of young American women are without strong sexual feeling and instead of satisfying their libido they seek pleasure narcissistically in exhibitionism, vanity, and the cult of fitness and health in a sterile sense.

To write well and speak well is mere vanity if one does not live well.

Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.

I am philosophical Christ; crucified on the cross of ignorance for the sake of divine vanity.

The individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance.

A man who is not a fool can rid himself of every folly except vanity.

To all those whose progress remains hampered by ego-related distractions, let humility - the spiritual cornerstone upon which Karate rests - serve to remind one to place virtue before vice, values before vanity and principles before personalities.