Top 45 Human Vanity Quotes
#1. 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.
Richard Dawkins
#2. Having a purebred human baby is like having a purebred dog; it's nothing but vanity, human vanity.
Ingrid Newkirk
#3. He who commends the nature of the soul as the supreme good, and condemns the nature of the flesh as evil, at once both carnally desires the soul, and carnally flies the flesh, because he feels thus from human vanity, not from divine truth.
Saint Augustine
#4. The most vulnerable and yet most unconquerable of things is human vanity; nay, through being wounded its strength increases and can grow to giant proportions.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#5. Everything else, everything, is just human vanity, the dash on the headstone between the day we're born and the day we die.
Victor Bevine
#6. The strongest knowledge (that of the total freedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: for it always has the strongest opponent, human vanity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#7. These infinitesimal distinctions between man and man are too paltry for an Omnipotent Being. How these madmen
give themselves away! The real God taketh heed lest a sparrow fall. But the God created from human vanity sees
no difference between an eagle and a sparrow.
Bram Stoker
#8. As a person I'm perfectly vain, I'm just vainer as an actor about my ability. My acting vanity trumps my human vanity.
Rufus Sewell
#9. No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity
Edith Wharton
#10. The only way not to worry about the race problem is to be doing something about it yourself. When you are, natural human vanity makes you feel that now the thing is in good hands.
Margaret Halsey
#11. Falsehoods of convenience or vanity, falsehoods from which no evil immediately visible ensues, except the general degradation of human testimony, are very lightly uttered, and once uttered are sullenly supported.
Samuel Johnson
#12. Daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity.
Max Weber
#13. [ ... ] But then,
What is not vain, by God, in lives of men?
All is in vain! We play at blind man's buff
Until hard edges break into out path.
Man life's is error. Where, then, is relief?
In shedding tears or wrestling down my grief?
Jan Kochanowski
#14. The vanity of human life is like a river, constantly passing away, and yet constantly coming on.
Alexander Pope
#15. The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive.
William Gibson
#16. 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
#17. When you come to examine into the actuating motives for any line of human endeavor you will find that vanity figures about ninety per cent directly or indirectly, in the assay.
Samuel G. Blythe
#18. Humans are strange. ... They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important - that they are important. ... it's vanity.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#19. Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man's vanity to be loathsome.
Hans Arp
#20. Ah, now I have learned how deep in the human heart vanity lies, vanity which is the other face of the fear of being unloved.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#21. The rationalism of the creative minds was tempered by abundant fantasies, and the supreme beauty of the monuments was probably spoiled by the circumambient vanities and ugliness; in a few cases the Greeks came as close to perfection as it was possible to do, yet they were human and imperfect.
George Sarton
#23. No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.
Samuel Johnson
#24. Such is the weakness of our nature, that when men are a little exalted in their condition they immediately conceive they have additional senses, and their capacities enlarged not only above other men, but above human comprehension itself.
Richard Steele
#25. A philosopher may deplore the eternal discords of the human race, but he will confess, that the desire of spoil is a more rational provocation than the vanity of conquest.
Edward Gibbon
#26. When things went wrong they had the consolations of religion. This wasn't just a readiness to accept Fate; this was a quiet and profound conviction about the vanity of all human endeavour.
V.S. Naipaul
#27. The human heart has so many crannies where vanity hides, so many holes where falsehood works, is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy, that it often dupes itself.
John Calvin
#28. People think they can tame the earth. How absurd! The vanity of human wishes is endless. It is more fun to dance with life.
Frederick Lenz
#29. Goliath symbolizes the vanity and the illusions of this world. They disappear in a puff
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#30. Adam named every creature in the garden. And we've been paying for his presumption ever since.
Marty Rubin
#31. Trace Science, then, with Modesty thy guide,
First strip off all her equipage of Pride,
Deduct what is but Vanity or Dress,
Or Learning's Luxury or idleness,
Or tricks, to show the stretch of the human brain
Mere curious pleasure or ingenious pain.
Alexander Pope
#32. No living creature is naturally greedy, except from fear of want - or in the case of human beings, from vanity, the notion that you're better than people if you can display more superfluous property than they can.
Thomas More
#33. He [man] abuses equally other animals and his own species, the rest of whom live in famine, languish in misery, and work only to satisfy the immoderate appetite and the still more insatiable vanity of this human being who, destroying others by want, destroys himself by excess.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#34. Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.
Aldous Huxley
#35. 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.
Albert Einstein
#36. 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
James Madison
#37. Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment
Michel De Montaigne
#38. Just as bones, tissues, intestines, and blood vessels are enclosed in a skin that makes it possible to bear the sight of a human being, so the agitations and passions of the soul are wrapped up in vanity: it is the soul's skin.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#40. He has never known a woman so free from conceit, vanity, ambition, pretense. He has never known a woman so willing to show the world that she is a human being.
Elin Hilderbrand
#41. But if we reason it out simply and not try to be one bit fancy, then what sort of pride can you possibly take or what's the sense of ever having it, if man is poorly put together as a physiological type and if the enormous majority of the human race is brutal, stupid, and profoundly unhappy?
Anton Chekhov
#42. Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.
Ivan Klima
#43. What people regard as vanity - leaving great works, having children, acting in such a way as to prevent one's name from being forgotten - I regard as the highest expression of human dignity.
Paulo Coelho
#44. Man may think human intellect and reasoning are almighty, that the brain is able to comprehend all truths of the world; but the verdict of God's Word is, vanity of vanities.
Watchman Nee
#45. Every man is sensitive. Some cover it up with brutality, others with cowardice and vanity, but a small few wear it bravely like armor
Solange Nicole
