Quotes About Vanity

I think that magazines like Vanity Fair are still operating under the old rules, and that if you come to work for a magazine like Vanity Fair, even today, you're certainly expected to treat people like Peggy Siegal very deferentially.

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

An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it's beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth... Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, and there is nothing new under the sun, as Solomon said more than three thousand years ago.

Vanity, or to call it by a gentler name, the desire of admiration and applause, is, perhaps, the most universal principle of humanactions.... Where that desire is wanting, we are apt to be indifferent, listless, indolent, and inert.... I will own to you, under the secrecy of confession, that my vanity has very often made me take great pains to make many a woman in love with me, if I could, for whose person I would not have given a pinch of snuff.

For it is a matter of daily observation that people take the greatest pleasure in that which satisfies their vanity; and vanity cannot be satisfied without comparison with others.

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.

I wanted at one point to act, which is a weird thing for men to want to do. It's a very vain profession. I don't mind women who want to act. That's fine. It's odd that men want to act, in that there's still a degree of vanity associated with it. It's like, "Put on some makeup, make me look good. Okay, now I'm going to roll my shoulder." Part of me still feels like, "Wow, that's weird for a man to do."

When you eliminate vanity from an art form, and I would think that this would be any art form, what is left is an opportunity to be incredibly naked and truthful.

Love is the miracle cure. Loving ourselves works miracles in our lives. I am not talking about vanity or arrogance . . . for that is not love. It is only fear. I am talking about having a great respect for ourselves and a gratitude for the miracle of our body and our mind.

The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

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.

What man needs is not philosophy or religion in the academic or formalistic sense of the term, but ability to think rightly. The malady of the age is not absence of philosophy or even irreligion but wrong thinking and a vanity which passes for knowledge. Though it is difficult to define right thinking, it cannot be denied that it is the goal of the aspirations of everyone.

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.

Ecclesiastes said that "all is vanity," Most modern preachers say the same, or show it By their examples of true Christianity: In short, all know, or very short may know it.

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.

I found during the course of my political career on the national scene there's a point where the vanity burns away and you've had your fill of your name in the papers, or big adoring crowds, or the exercise of power. And for me that happened fairly quickly. And then you are really focused on: What am I going to get done with this strange privilege that's been granted to me? How do I make myself worthy of it?

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

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.

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

The object of geometry in all its measuring and computing, is to ascertain with exactness the plan of the great Geometer, to penetrate the veil of material forms, and disclose the thoughts which lie beneath them? When our researches are successful, and when a generous and heaven-eyed inspiration has elevated us above humanity, and raised us triumphantly into the very presence, as it were, of the divine intellect, how instantly and entirely are human pride and vanity repressed, and, by a single glance at the glories of the infinite mind, are we humbled to the dust.

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.

Vanity is the healthiest thing in life.

Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart--and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit.

Those who, either from their own engagements and hurry of business, or from indolence, or from conceit and vanity, have neglected looking out of themselves, as far as my experience and observation reach, have from that time not only ceased to advance, and improve in their performances, but have gone backward. They may be compared to men who have lived upon their principal, till they are reduced to beggary, and left without resources.

There’s just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It’s not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it’s that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don’t see what you wish to see—or glimpse something that you wish weren’t there.

The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words.

The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

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.

Either you are so underdeveloped that you can't see all that you can do, or you won't sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it.

Doing press is like eating at McDonald's: while it's going on it's vaguely enjoyable - you're seduced by your own vanity and taking yourself rather seriously - but immediately afterwards you feel sick.

I saw myself. . . in the time I watched, I saw strength and frailty, pride and vanity, courage and fear. Of wisdom, a little. Of folly much. Of intentions many good ones; but many more left undone. On this alas, I saw myself a man like any other. But this too I saw . . . Alike as men may seem, each is different as flakes of snow, no two the same.You told me you had no need to seek the Mirror, knowing you were Annlaw Clay-Shaper. Now I know who I am: myself and none other. I am Taran.

Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things.

Solitude is the surest nurse of all prurient passions, and a girl in the hurry of preparation, or tumult of gaiety, has neither inclination nor leisure to let tender expressions soften or sink into her heart. The ball, the show, are not the dangerous places: no, 'tis the private friend, the kind consoler, the companion of the easy vacant hour, whose compliance with her opinions can flatter her vanity, and whose conversation can sooth, without ever stretching her mind, that is the lover to be feared: he who buzzes in her ear at court, or at the opera, must be contented to buzz in vain.

Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.

Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

I'm not invited to the Vanity Fair dinner where they watch the Oscars - or even the Oscars themselves - so I sit at home and watch it with a bunch of close friends.

Vain men delight in telling what Honours have been done them, what great Company they have kept, and the like; by which they plainly confess, that these Honours were more than their Due, and such as their Friends would not believe if they had not been told: Whereas a Man truly proud, thinks the greatest Honours below his Merit, and consequently scorns to boast. I therefore deliver it as a Maxim that whoever desires the Character of a proud Man, ought to conceal his Vanity.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.

It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption, too, after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth, to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to it all.

Vanity, indeed, is the very antidote to conceit; for while the former makes us all nerve to the opinion of others, the latter is perfectly satisfied with its opinion of itself.

Purpose without virtue is vanity.

I don't really talk about this because it seems indulgent, but I lost my hair, I'm bald, I had alopecia in my teens. That was back in the late '80s, well before people shaved their heads. So it's probably one of the reasons why I have been obsessed with that age, because it's locked in time where I feel like I had this personal loss that so affected my vanity, and I don't really feel like I handled it well. I'm so much older now, so it's not a big deal, but when I think back at it, I can conjure up how I felt then.

Vanity finds in self-love so powerful an ally that it storms, as it were, by a coup de main,, the citadel of our heads, where, having blinded the two watchmen, it readily descends into the heart.

The President of the United States again, whether you guys like the guy, you dislike the guy, he's the smartest person that I've ever worked for. So let Vanity Fair write about that, I honestly don't care. He has intuition, he has judgement and he has a temperament in a way that I have never seen.

Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find it everywhere.

There are some who become spies for money, or out of vanity and megalomania, or out of ambition, or out of a desire for thrills. But the malady of our time is of those who become spies out of idealism.