Top 65 Quotes About Vanities
#1. You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.
Voltaire
#2. Bonfire of the Vanities: The lesson of that book is, never start believing your own press.
Charles James
#3. The worst part about her new chambers was that all these wardrobes and vanities and drapes meant there was no space--none at all--for a bookcase. Who on earth could feel comfortable enough to sleep in a room with no books?
Cynthia Hand
#4. On suicide:
Those are vanities, child. They cause immeasurable suffering in this life and all future lives. Who knows, perhaps you have been given this harsh portion because of misdeeds in some past life.
John Speed
#5. The churchyard is the market place where all things are rated at their true value, and those who are approaching it talk of the world and its vanities with a wisdom unknown before.
Richard Baxter
#6. Great sins are great possessions; but levities and vanities possess us too; and men had rather part with Christ than with any possession.
John Donne
#7. Shame is the fruit of my vanities, and remorse, and the clearest knowledge of how the world's delight is a brief dream.
Francesco Petrarca
#8. Superstition is not, as has been defined, an excess of religious feeling, but a misdirection of it, an exhausting of it on vanities of man's devising.
Richard Whately
#9. 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
#10. Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.
John Williams
#11. You come to know the aches and vanities and tastes and intrigues of an entire neighborhood at a drug store.
Paul Engle
#12. With varying vanities, from ev'ry part, They shift the moving Toyshop of their heart; 100 Where wigs with wigs, with sword-knots sword-knots strive, Beaux banish beaux, and coaches coaches drive.
Alexander Pope
#13. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
Qoheleth
#14. Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness ...
Virginia Woolf
#15. The same way that I know that I'll never do a movie as good or as celebrated as 'Forrest Gump,' I know that I'll never do a movie as bad as 'Bonfire of the Vanities.'
Tom Hanks
#17. I knew I was going from the flock of Christ and had no resolution to return, hence serious reflections were uneasy to me, and youthful vanities and diversions were my greatest pleasure.
John Woolman
#18. Why seek to embarrass [the artist] with vanities foreign to his quietness? Know you not that certain sciences require the whole man, leaving no part of him at leisure for your trifles?
Leonardo Da Vinci
#19. There are a thousand flowers blossoming in spring, The magical light of the full moon in autumn; There is a breeze in summer, And snow in winter; And if vanities don't hang in my mind, I shall rejoice at any time and place.
Wumen Huikai
#20. Such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happen much oftener.
Francis Bacon
#21. The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power.
Henry A. Wallace
#22. I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
Lionel Shriver
#23. Aristocracy has three successive ages. First superiority s, then privileges and finally vanities. Having passed from the first, it degenerates in the second and dies in the third.
Bill Vaughan
#24. Oh Lord, give us a sense of humor with courage to manifest it forth, so that we may laugh to shame the pomps, the vanities, the sense of self-importance of the Big Fellows that the world sometimes sends among us, and who try to take our peace away.
Sean O'Casey
#25. Meek Nature's evening comment on the shows That for oblivion take their daily birth From all the fuming vanities of earth.
William Wordsworth
#26. The vanities of all others may gradually die out, but the vanity of a saint regarding his sainthood is hard indeed to wear away.
Ramakrishna
#27. The alchemists spent years in their laboratories, observing the fire that purified the metals. They spent so much time close to the fire that gradually they gave up the vanities of the world. They discovered that the purification of the metals had led to a purification of themselves.
Paulo Coelho
#30. One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.
Virginia Woolf
#31. My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.
Mark Twain
#32. I destroyed all my geek stuff because I didn't want to be a geek, and I regret it to this day. Consumed in the geek bonfire of the vanities was a collection of autographs and letters from Peter Cushing, Spike Milligan and Frankie Howerd, the first Doctor Whos, actual astronauts, and many more.
Peter Capaldi
#33. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, and there is nothing new under the sun, as Solomon said more than three thousand years ago.
Paulo Coelho
#34. We all have our vanities. The retouching magazines like 'Vogue' do is the professional version of the retouching we do when we, for example, apply Instagram filters to the pictures we take and share on our social networks.
Roxane Gay
#35. Yes, be different, but not for the vanities of being different.
Criss Jami
#36. The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.
T. S. Eliot
#37. He [the miser] falls down and worships the god of this world, but will have neither its pomps, its vanities nor its pleasures for his trouble.
Charles Caleb Colton
#38. The deeper I go in considering the vanities of popular reasoning, the lighter and more foolish I find them. What greater stupidity can be imagined than that of calling jewels, silver, and gold "precious," and earth and soil "base"?
Galileo Galilei
#39. In spite of her small vanities, Margaret had a sweet and pious nature, which unconsciously influenced her sisters, especially Jo, who loved her very tenderly, and obeyed her because her advice was so gently given.
Louisa May Alcott
#40. Reading was my hobby, my sport and my activity of choice. It was the prime pleasure of my days, an unfailing escape from whatever realities were distressing me, and the only source of pride I knew, other vanities lying beyond my grasp. I couldn't do anything else well, but I could do words.
Cynthia Voigt
#41. I was good at being charming, one of my very few vanities.
Jeff Lindsay
#42. I think comedy and satire are a very important part of democracy, and it's important we are able to laugh at the idiosyncrasies or the follies or vanities of people in power.
Rory Bremner
#43. Let us have gardens, then, and other public places where we may see our friends, and parade our vanities, if you will, before the eyes of the world. Did you ever know anyone who was not delighted with a garden? - John Sanderson
David McCullough
#44. Up to his twenty-sixth year the heart of Ignatius was enthralled by the vanities of the world. His special delight was in the military life, and he seemed led by a strong and empty desire of gaining for himself a great name.
Ignatius Of Loyola
#45. Many other means there be, that promise the foreknowledge of things to come: besides the raising up and conjuring of ghosts departed, the conference also with familiars and spirits infernal. And all these were found out in our days, to be no better than vanities and false illusions ...
Pliny The Elder
#46. The only practical effect of having a soul is that it fills man with anthropomorphic and anthropocentric vanities - in brief, with the cocky superstitions that make him disgusting.
H.L. Mencken
#47. Not everything you hear about yourself can be considered good publicity. And if you have delicate sensibilities, the currycomb of public imagination frequently rubs your vanities the wrong way.
Corra May Harris
#48. Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies.
Dejan Stojanovic
#49. Quomondo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
Evelyn Waugh
#50. It were better for a man to be subject to any vice than to drunkenness; for all other vanities and sins are recovered, but a drunkard will never shake off the delight of beastliness.
Walter Raleigh
#51. When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You're just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you.
Salman Rushdie
#52. It took him a moment to realize that they had been painted to look like fingernails, and he sighed over the extraordinary range of female vanities.
Helen Simonson
#53. It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed 'Wisdom.' And then I know exactly what is going to follow: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#54. Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs from another.
George Eliot
#55. 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
#56. What if the man could see Beauty Itself, pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality, and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine, ... the man becoming in that communion, the friend of God, himself immortal; ... would that be a life to disregard?
Plato
#57. She had no little vanities, only one big one, and she would never forgive.
Willa Cather
#58. At the end of medicine is dope; at the end of life is death; at the end of man may be the Hell which arrives from the vanities of the mind.
Norman Mailer
#59. Thus aged men, full loth and slow, The vanities of life forego, And count their youthful follies o'er, Till Memory lends her light no more.
Walter Scott
#60. Euler calculated the force of the wheels necessary to raise the water in a reservoir ... My mill was carried out geometrically and could not raise a drop of water fifty yards from the reservoir. Vanity of vanities! Vanity of geometry!
Frederick The Great
#61. Oh, Vanity of vanities! How wayward the decrees of Fate are; How very weak the very wise, How very small the very great are!
William Makepeace Thackeray
#62. One's own vanities and humiliations I find a delicious subject for conversation. Things said of me behind my back I don't enjoy, and don't listen to them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#63. Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.
Tennessee Williams
#64. I do not know
What kind of my obedience I should tender.
More than my all is nothing; nor my prayers
Are not words holy hallowed, nor my wishes
More worth than empty vanities; yet prayers and wishes
Are all I can return.
William Shakespeare
#65. I went to Cal Arts and AFI, and I worked on 'Bonfire Of The Vanities.' I got this grant from the Academy to be Brian De Palma's apprentice director. And it was such a harrowing, disillusioning, awful experience.
Douglas Rushkoff
