Top 100 Quotes About Vanity
#1. Vanity is something that will only get in the way of doing your best work, and ultimately if you're truly vain you care more about your work than how you look in your work. I actually consider myself a pretty vain guy when it comes to that.
Philip Seymour Hoffman
#2. 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.
John Berger
#3. Some have lavish garments, carry sharp swords, and feast on food and drink. They possess more than they can spend. This is called the vanity of robbers. It is certainly not the Way.
Laozi
#4. The love of one's own sex is precious, for it is neither provoked by vanity nor retained by flattery; it is genuine and sincere.
Maria Mitchell
#5. You can't control how you are perceived, and you are a fool if you waste any energy trying to do so. Vanity will get you nowhere.
Dave Blood
#6. 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.
Eric Hoffer
#7. Bodybuilding is men on a stage in their underwear wearing brown paint showing other men their muscles. It is training for appearance only, and at the contest level requires a degree of vanity, narcissism, and self-absorption that I find distasteful and odd
Mark Rippetoe
#8. HIV is certainly character-building. It's made me see all of the shallow things we cling to, like ego and vanity. Of course, I'd rather have a few more T-cells and a little less character.
Randy Shilts
#9. Vanity is the most despotic and iniquitous of masters, and I can never be the slave of my own vices.
George Sand
#10. At the end of the day, if pride is your greatest strength, turn it into vanity.
Lionel Suggs
#11. Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.
Stephen Spender
#12. What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#13. He paused, I thought, like a man who is watching the effect of the terrors he excites, not from malignity but vanity, merely to magnify his own courage in encountering them.
Charles Robert Maturin
#14. I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#15. Guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.
Toni Morrison
#16. Now, I'm not saying I'm fashionable, but there are sociological interests that matter to me, things that are theoretical, political, intellectual and also concerned with vanity and beauty that we all think about but that I try to mix up and translate into fashion.
Miuccia Prada
#17. There is something wrong about being photographed that has nothing to do with vanity.
Nigella Lawson
#18. I've been on sets where the turnaround is so fast and the budget so small that the actors have been asked to speed things up and save money by changing in the public toilets. There's no room for vanity at times like that. It's the best way: get on with it!
Anna Friel
#19. 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.
Rick McCallum
#20. Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.
Margaret Atwood
#21. A man's vanity is more fragile that you might think. It's easy for us to mistake shyness for coldness, and silence for indifference.
Lisa Kleypas
#23. The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.
Blaise Pascal
#24. When we stay close to the wisdom of our knowing, seeking solutions to our problems in the sanctuary of the heart and not in the vanity of the mind, then we can pretty much trust in the unfolding, mysterious wisdom of life.
Marianne Williamson
#25. Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds
a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents
Albert Camus
#26. Vanity keeps persons in favor with themselves who are out of favor with all others.
William Shakespeare
#27. All men dream, but nor equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible. This I did.
T.E. Lawrence
#28. Most systems end up by making imagined humility into a form of vanity, so they end up with vanity just the same.
Idries Shah
#29. There are no grades of vanity; there are only grades of ability in concealing it.
Mark Twain
#30. You'll just pamper Anne's vanity, Matthew, and she's as vain as a peacock now.
L.M. Montgomery
#31. The a priori method is distinguished for its comfortable conclusions. It is the nature of the process to adopt whatever belief weare inclined to, and there are certain flatteries to the vanity of man which we all believe by nature, until we are awakened from our pleasing dream by rough facts.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#32. Everyone is Annawadi talks like this- oh, I will make my child a doctor, a lawyer, and he will make us rich. It's vanity, nothing more. Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, "What a navigator I am!" And then the wind blows you east. -ABDUL'S FATHER, KARAM HUSAIN
Katherine Boo
#33. My vanity is I'm terribly romantic! But being married is lovely.
Matthew Macfadyen
#34. Oh, how happy I am to have found it at last. Yes! It's all vanity, it's all an illusion, everything except that infinite sky.
Leo Tolstoy
#35. She had been nothing but a beloved bauble passed from a mother to a son, a decoration of vanity, devoid of identity.
D. Morgenstern
#36. We all of us must come to terms with what and who we are, and recognize that this wisdom is not going to earn us any praise, that life is not going to pin a medal on us for recognizing and enduring our own vanity or egoism or baldness or our potbelly.
Sandor Marai
#37. What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity which the most modest possesses when, in the midst of nature and the world, he feels himself to be man!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#38. Bacamarte evidenced neither vanity nor modesty; he listened in silence, as impassive as a stone god.
Machado De Assis
#39. It generally takes its rise either from an ill-will to mankind, a private inclination to make ourselves esteemed, an ostentation of wit, and vanity of being thought in the secrets of the world; or from a desire of gratifying any of these dispositions of mind in those persons with whom we converse.
Joseph Addison
#40. My vanity is not dead. I laugh when I see pictures of myself as I am now-maybe so I won't cry, but just because it is really funny how much I've changed.
Michael Zaslow
#41. Oh vanity! You are the lever with which Archimedes wanted to raise the earthly globe!
Mikhail Lermontov
#42. University lectures are an obsolete practice inherited from the Middle Ages when books were scarce. Students should read, not listen. To swallow instruction from a lectern is like sipping through a straw. Lectures pander to the vanity of the lecturer and stimulate conflict between academics.
Virginia Woolf
#43. To abuse the intellect for reasons of pride, vanity, or escape from responsibility, is the fruit of that same tree.
Walter M. Miller Jr.
#44. Theodore Rex. Roosevelt was driven by ambition, idealism and vanity. As his daughter famously remarked: My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening.
Margaret MacMillan
#45. Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.
Lionel Shriver
#46. This old man had just humiliated me - and I sat there taking his ridicule like a child. I curled up on the vanity stool and sobbed for what felt like forever, in the one little corner of this whole giant mansion that was supposed to be my own.
Holly Madison
#47. Birds sing in vain to the ear, flowers bloom in vain to the eye, of mortified vanity and galled ambition. He who would know repose in retirement must carry into retirement his destiny, integral and serene, as the Caesars transported the statue of Fortune into the chamber they chose for their sleep.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#48. There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.
T. S. Eliot
#49. For vanity, too, inebriates; gratitude, too, intoxicates; tenderness, too, can blissfully confuse the senses.
Stefan Zweig
#50. The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.
Adam Smith
#51. I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.
John Keats
#52. For say what you will of lovers there's nothing so flattering to female vanity as the praise of a husband, because it is universally considered a more difficult matter to retain affection than to win it.
Hannah Crafts
#53. A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.
Honore De Balzac
#54. Flattery is an ensnaring quality, and leaves a very dangerous impression. It swells a man's imagination, entertains his vanity, and drives him to a doting upon his own person.
Jeremy Collier
#55. There you have it! - How they anticipate my wishes, how they grant friendship's little attentions, which are worth a thousand times more than breathtaking presents that merely prove the giver's vanity and humiliate us.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#56. Clemency, which we make a virtue of, proceeds sometimes from vanity, sometimes from indolence, often from fear, and almost always from a mixture of all three.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#57. 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.
Saint John Chrysostom
#58. She wasn't soft, but she never saw the sense of a living thing dying such a cruel death just for some woman's vanity. Still, she thought, a fur coat when the wind blew down off the Tenmile Range would feel mighty good. Maybe they made fur coats out of foxes that died of old age.
Sandra Dallas
#59. What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#60. Dancing serves no necessary use, no profitable, laudable, or pious end at all. It is only from the inbred pravity, vanity, wantonness, incontinency, pride, profaneness, or madness of man's depraved nature.
William Prynne
#61. Whatever pretended causes we may blame our afflictions upon, it is often nothing but self-interest and vanity that produce them.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#62. No point in wasting time with false vanity when you possess the real thing.
Alan Bradley
#63. I was really excited to get to shave my head - it's something I'd wanted to do for a while and now I had a good excuse. It was nice to shed that level of vanity.
Natalie Portman
#64. It is a rule of creative ability that it does nothing of any value, while it is possessed by this afflatus of vanity.
Christina Stead
#65. One of the main goals of self-education is to eradicate that vanity in us without which we would never have been educated.
Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach
#66. Business was successfully concluded. But - strange is man: he was deeply mortified at being in disfavour with the very people whom he did not respect, and whose vanity and love of dress he derided.
Nikolai Gogol
#67. One of the troubles about vanity is that it grows with what it feeds on. The more you are talked about, the more you will wish to be talked about.
Bertrand Russell
#68. I pulled on the restraints, frustrated, hurting, and completely devastated. I could feel tears sliding down my skin, into my ears, and back over my scalp. Which told me that they'd cut off my hair, too. For some reason, that little bit of vanity was what it took to undo me completely.
Elizabeth Schechter
#69. Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety.
Stephen Young
#70. One great cause of the vanity, extravagance and idleness that are so fast growing upon our young ladies, is the absence of domestic education.
Lydia Maria Francis Child
#71. There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
#72. Social media has infected the world with a sickening virus called vanity.
Kellie Elmore
#73. Music is made one of Satan's most attractive agencies to ensnare souls; but, when turned to a good account, it is a blessing. When abused, it leads the unconsecrated to pride, vanity, and folly.
Ellen G. White
#74. The black snake of wounded vanity had been gnawing at his heart all night.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#75. Pride is a wound, and vanity is the scab on it. One's life picks at the scab to open the wound again and again. In men, it seldom heals and often grows septic.
Michael Ayrton
#76. No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a public library.
Samuel Johnson
#78. I'm not motivated by vanity, glory or the quest for power.
Michele Bachmann
#79. 209. He who gives himself to vanity, and does not give himself to meditation, forgetting the real aim (of life) and grasping at pleasure, will in time envy him who has exerted himself in meditation.
Anonymous
#80. That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.
Andre Dubus
#81. Vanity should never tempt a player to engage in a combat at the risk of loss of health. It is bad enough to lose without the additional annoyance of paying doctors' bills.
Emanuel Lasker
#82. Well, there are more writers of blogs right now than there are readers, so that's clearly a vanity phenomenon.
John Doerr
#83. A man should fear when he enjoys only the good he does publicly. Is it not, publicity rather than charity, which he loves? Is it not vanity, rather than benevolence, that gives such charities?
Henry Ward Beecher
#84. We did a 'Vanity Fair' spread for 'The Hunger Games,' and we were on set, and I saw a little head pop up from the tree. There were three teenage girls who snuck past security and made it into the forest.
Alexander Ludwig
#85. Michael Lewis, author of 'Moneyball,' got special access for a profile of Obama for 'Vanity Fair' - but Obama insisted on redlining his quotes.
Ben Shapiro
#86. I write all the time, but you just want to be careful what you put out. That's all. You want to have the confidence that you've done what you need to do to it, because otherwise it's an exercise in vanity.
Dylan Moran
#87. 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
#88. The days of my vanity are over and heaven knows they weren't happy enough to regret
Emma Donoghue
#89. The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#90. My vanity was flattered by having been mistaken for our revered sovereign. I ordered a banquet to be got ready for the following evening, under the trees before my house, and invited the whole town.
Adelbert Von Chamisso
#91. 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.
William James
#92. You're thinking that people don't keep up old jealousies for twenty years or so. Perhaps not. Not just primitive, brute jealousy. That means a word and a blow. But the thing that rankles is hurt vanity. That sticks. Humiliation. And we've all got a sore spot we don't like to have touched.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#93. Whether a man hides his bad qualities and vices or confesses them openly, his vanity wants to gain an advantage by it in both cases: just note how subtly he distinguishes between those he will hide his bad qualities from and those he will face honestly and candidly.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#94. Like many other simple-hearted souls, it was her pet vanity to believe she was endowed with a talent for dark and mysterious diplomacy, and she loved to contemplate her most transparent devices as marvels of low cunning. Said
Mark Twain
#95. We have done everything within the scope of modern medicine.' Those are just words. They apparently did everything within their erratic knowledge and the limits of their vanity.
Sandor Marai
#96. Soldiers have many vices, but vanity is not amongst them. How could it be? What man is going to worry about his hair when he might lose his head?
Sharon Kay Penman
#97. The meaning of life is 'the ultimate questioner's vanity.'
Kedar Joshi
#98. Vanity's really overrated. When I was 20, teenage girls had my picture on the wall ... I don't need to be pretty anymore. I just am who I am.
Michael J. Fox
#99. We find other people's vanity contrary to our taste only when it is contrary to our vanity.
Friedrich Nietzsche
