Top 70 Quotes About Vanity Upon Vanity
#1. 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
#2. When we are conscious of the least comparative merit in ourselves, we should take as much care to conceal the value we set upon it, as if it were a real defect; to be elated or vain upon it is showing your money before people in want.
Colley Cibber
#3. This nation is like all the others that have been spewed upon the earth
ready to shout for any cause that will tickle its vanity or fill its pocket. What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!
- Letter to J. H. Twichell, 1/29/1901
Mark Twain
#4. 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.
Victor Hugo
#5. You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.
Ambrose Bierce
#6. For my type of story and my kind of writing, I think 'Vanity Fair' is the right forum.
Dominick Dunne
#7. Professor Manley begins his first day of Uglification class by explaining why villains must be ugly to succeed. Ugliness releases you from the surface - from the prison of vanity and youur own looks - and sets you free to embrace the soul within.
Soman Chainani
#8. When women smoke, it is hard for them to quit because they are so worried about their weight; it's a vanity issue and a mindset.
Loni Anderson
#12. It is in vain that we get upon stilts, for once on them, it is still with our legs that we must walk. And on the highest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own ass.
Michel De Montaigne
#14. I've loved many women ... I'm not going to lie to you, but it never works ... vanity always gets in the way.
Cassandra Giovanni
#15. One altar forever is preserved, that whereon we burn incense to the supreme idol,
ourselves, our god is great, and money is his Prophet! We devastate nature in order to make sacrifice to him; we boast that we have conquered Matter and forget that it is matter that has forever enslaved us.
Okakura Kakuzo
#16. 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
#17. I am content with nothing, restless and ambitious ... and I despise myself for the vanity, which formed half the stimulus to my exertions. Oh would that I were one of those plodding wise fools who having once set their hand to the plough go on nothing doubting.
Thomas Huxley
#18. I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love.
Joyce Carol Oates
#19. Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions.
Honore De Balzac
#20. There are people who indulge themselves in a sort of lying, which they reckon innocent, and which in one sense is so; for it hurtsnobody but themselves. This sort of lying is the spurious offspring of vanity, begotten upon folly.
Lord Chesterfield
#21. A pretty wife is something for the fastidious vanity of a roue to retire upon.
Thomas Moore
#22. There is no limit to the vanity of this world. Each spoke in the wheel thinks the whole strength of the wheel depends upon it.
Josh Billings
#23. He had placed himself at her feet so long that the poor little woman had been accustomed to trample upon him. She didn't wish to marry him, but she wished to keep him. She wished to give him nothing, but that he should give her all. It is a bargain not unfrequently levied in love.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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.
Matsumura Sokon
#28. Having a purebred human baby is like having a purebred dog; it's nothing but vanity, human vanity.
Ingrid Newkirk
#29. In the stress of modern life, how little room is left for that most comfortable vanity that whispers in our ears that failures are not faults! Now we are taught from infancy that we must rise or fall upon our own merits; that vigilance wins success, and incapacity means ruin
Agnes Repplier
#30. Whatsoever we have over-loved, idolized, and leaned upon, God has from time to time broken it, and made us to see the vanity of it; so that we find the readiest course to be rid of our comforts is to set our hearts inordinately upon them.
John Flavel
#31. Not of exhaustion, but surrender, as though he had given over and relinquished completely that grip upon that blending of pride and hope and vanity and fear, that strength to cling to either defeat or victory, which is the I-Am, and the relinquishment of which is usually death.
William Faulkner
#32. The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.
Immanuel Kant
#33. The faults of a man loved or honoured sometimes steal secretly and imperceptibly upon the wise and virtuous, but by injudicious fondness or thoughtless vanity are adopted with design.
Samuel Johnson
#34. If lighthouse becomes a burning candle,
flickered upon ocean's insanity.
Your sailing heart there anchors to handle
the obsessed breeze towards sand dune's vanity.
Munia Khan
#35. No; for instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of them as others do, I am always troubling my head about how I could produce the same effect upon canvas; and as that can never be done, it is more vanity and vexation of spirit.
Anne Bronte
#36. There are those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge; that is Curiosity.
There are those who seek knowledge to be known by others; that is Vanity.
There are those who seek knowledge in order to serve; that is Love.
Bernard Of Clairvaux
#37. Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
James Joyce
#38. Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart
and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#41. That something so obvious as the vanity of the world should be so little recognized that people find it odd and surprising to be told that it is foolish to seek greatness; that is most remarkable.
Blaise Pascal
#42. In my opinion, better far it be To destroy vanity within my life Than to destroy my life in vanity.
Juana Ines De La Cruz
#43. Vanity and prejudice have as usual played havoc with the truth, and Mr. Topper's reputation has been tossed into a furnace of frantically wagging tongues. The
Thorne Smith
#44. of light and life, thou Good Supreme! O teach me what is good; teach me Thyself! Save me from folly, vanity, and vice, From every low pursuit; and fill my soul With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure; Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!
Benjamin Franklin
#45.
nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others
Philip Roth
#46. The stupidest people suddenly become a little cleverer when we learn that they think well of us
Jude Morgan
#47. If all were perfect Christians, individuals would do their duty; the people would be obedient to the laws, the magistrates incorrupt, and there would be neither vanity nor luxury in such a state.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#49. Until the Donkey tried to clear The Fence, he thought himself a Deer.
Arthur Guiterman
#50. Don't worry about what others think about you; worry about what they think of themselves when they're with you.
Hilary Weeks
#51. Vanity is so constantly solicitous of self, that even where its own claims are not interested, it indirectly seeks the aliment which it loves, by showing how little is deserved by others.
William Gilmore Simms
#52. Goliath symbolizes the vanity and the illusions of this world. They disappear in a puff
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#53. But how can anyone put a bridle on man's vanity and arrogance? But how can Purity walk the earth without covering her feet with mud?
Nikos Kazantzakis
#54. Once in a stately passion I cried with desperate grief
'Oh Lord, my heart is black with guile, of sinners I am chief'
Then stooped my guardian angel and whispered from behind
'Vanity my little man, you're nothing of the kind'
James Thomson
#55. 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
#56. A vain man is a nauseous creature: he is so full of himself that he has no room for anything else, be it never so good or deserving.
William Penn
#58. Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things.
Edward Abbey
#59. The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.
Iris Murdoch
#60. Adam named every creature in the garden. And we've been paying for his presumption ever since.
Marty Rubin
#61. Vanity in an old man is charming. It is a proof of an open, nature. Eighty winters have not frozen him up, or taught him concealments. In a young person it is simply allowable; we do not expect him to be above it.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#62. Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.
Blaise Pascal
#63. I just don't get it. You've been in love with this bloke since you were a kid, and he's never once got his hair cut short enough that it doesn't poke him in the damn eye.
Kristina Adams
#65. What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it's easy to have glory without power.
Bertrand Russell
#66. It's always our touches of vanity that manage to betray us.
Christopher Fry
#67. But the greatest wisdom could be blinded by the glare of vanity.
Paulo Coelho
#68. Sacred writings are beneficial in stimulating desire for inward realization, if one stanza at a time is slowly assimilated. Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge." Sri
Paramahansa Yogananda
#69. Those whom the world has delighted to honor have oftener been influenced in their doings by ambition and vanity than by patriotism.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
