Top 100 So Vain Quotes
#1. Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.
Bernard Malamud
#2. And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain. Therefore, Farewell:
Michel De Montaigne
#3. No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.
Norman Mailer
#4. That darling boy is so vain he could make a thunderstorm be about him.
Pierce Brown
#5. Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn't know you were so vain; and I really can't see any resemblance between you,
Oscar Wilde
#7. If a real God were actually so vain as to constantly demand worship, then he would not be worth it.
Stellan Skarsgard
#8. Were not this desire of fame very strong, the difficulty of obtaining it, and the danger of losing it when obtained, would be sufficient to deter a man from so vain a pursuit.
Joseph Addison
#9. Examples would indeed be excellent things were not people so modest that none will set, and so vain that none will follow them.
Augustus Hare
#10. We are so presumptuous that we wish to be known to all the world, even to those who come after us; and we are so vain that the esteem of five or six persons immediately around us is enough to amuse and satisfy us.
Blaise Pascal
#11. Let me not be so vain to think that I'm the sole author of my victories and a victim of my defeats.
Ze Frank
#12. Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.
Oscar Wilde
#13. I don't know what a supermodel is. If they call me that, I might have to punch them. It's just so vain and so unreal.
Waris Dirie
#14. Looks are temporary and don't mirror what's inside. And usually, a great looking man is so vain. Maybe most good-looking women are too. I hope I'm not!
Dorothy Stratten
#15. You're so vain. I bet you think this song is about you.
Carly Simon
#16. Giggling, I drifted into a rendition of You're so Vain by Carly Simon to Lost Cause from Beck, stopping after (I Hate) Everything About You by Ugly Kid Joe.
Nice, Grace. What was that a montage of how I feel about Shane songs?
Christine Zolendz
#17. In outward show so splendid and so vain; 'tis but a gilded block without a brain.
Phaedrus
#18. We often brag that we are never bored with ourselves, and are so vain as never to think ourselves bad company.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#19. If every man who passed an unjust judgment on his fellow should be condemned, how many judges would be found so vain and foolish as to review and condemn their Maker's work?
Clarence Darrow
#20. All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.
Arthur Golden
#21. I feel like I am floating in plasma
I need a teacher or a lover
I need someone to risk being involved with me.
I am so vain
and I am so masochistic.
How can they coexist?
Francesca Woodman
#22. I'm not so vain as to believe that my involvement changes anything whatsoever.
Danny Glover
#23. I'm vain. My arms are thin, but I'm vain about loose flesh. And so I'm careful that what I wear will show off my best parts, which are my waist and my butt.
Jane Fonda
#24. Never had she so honestly felt that she could have loved him, as now, when all love must be vain.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#25. 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
#26. It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.
James Russell Lowell
#27. I think it's really rare to see women on television who are brilliant, selfish, vain, fallible - and I feel like I have all those capacities in myself, so it's good to see people in the media representing all of those things.
Kerry Bishe
#28. Let us all agree to die a little, or even completely so that African unity may not be a vain word
Ahmed Ben Bella
#29. It's not that I'm vain; I simply thought I had plenty of time, so I told Vivian I'd be ready to go in a few minutes.
Nicholas Sparks
#30. At grief so deep the tongue must wag in vain; the language of our sense and memory lacks the vocabulary of such pain.
Dante Alighieri
#31. Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.
Thomas Szasz
#32. Barni loved talking about the dresses. "Aren't they huge? I've just always been this way," she said, twirling a little. "Just born healthy, I guess."
Oh, God. I hated her so much.
Katherine Center
#33. Lysandra said softly, "I will not apologize to you. I serve her. And I am willing to spend the rest of my life pretending to be her so that her sacrifice isn't in vain - " "You
Sarah J. Maas
#34. So much the worse for you!" he said mentally, like a man who, after vainly attempting to extinguish a fire, should fly in a rage with his vain efforts and say, "Oh, very well then! you shall burn for this!
Leo Tolstoy
#35. I grew up in South Jamaica, Queens, in New York. My parents were very religious churchgoing people. They were very strict. I was never really allowed to indulge in anything vain. Modesty always. I have three brothers and two sisters, so everything was on a budget.
Wynter Gordon
#36. Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man. For just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is no profit in philosophy either, if it does not expel the suffering of the mind.
Epicurus
#37. It's much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#38. God has created nights well-populated
with dreams, crowded with mirror images,
so that man may feel that he is nothing more
than vain reflection. That's what frightens us.
Jorge Luis Borges
#39. On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow. -
Friedrich Nietzsche
#40. What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know ... . But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead - yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.
Katherine Mansfield
#41. Do angels take the Lord's name in vain? The idea is so ridiculous that we scarcely like to ask the question ... How dare we do that which angels dare not do? Is it possible for us to argue that that which is forbidden in heaven is praiseworthy on earth?
George Q. Cannon
#42. Lunatics! Vain creatures! They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end up by eating one another, that's what I prophesy.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#43. People desire so many things and waste their days in vain... Some yearn for gold, others for power, yet others for glory and a higher station. But when death's moment nears and they look back at their lives, they realize they've been happy only during those moments when they've loved.
Borje Vahamaki
#44. Both deaths were equally vain, neither of them shortened the war by so much as a second; but in both cases, the man or men who killed them believed it was just and necessary; and if they were wrong, who's to blame? What
Jonathan Littell
#45. Even though we both know that our loved one will never so much as look our way we can't erase that small something within us that continues to hope in vain.
Matsuri Hino
#46. And although thus short, we shorten many ways,
Living so little while we are alive;
In eating, drinking, sleeping, vain delight
So unawares comes on perpetual night,
And puts all pleasures vain unto eternal flight.
Anne Bradstreet
#47. Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.
Henry David Thoreau
#48. All is vanity and everybody's vain. Women are terribly vain. So are men - more so, if possible.
Jerome K. Jerome
#49. I've had to gain weight for roles and ugly myself up for roles. So yeah, I'm game. I'm game for that kind of thing. I'm certainly not too vain in that respect. If it's a great role, I'm willing to do whatever it is that it takes.
Jewel Staite
#50. Sometimes I'm haunted by the thought that we only have one life and we live it provisionally, waiting in vain for the day that our real life will begin. And so life passes by.
Ignazio Silone
#51. So soon did we, wayfarers, begin to learn that man's life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find it new.
Henry David Thoreau
#52. I-I'm just - I knew you were beautiful, knew it so very well, but it's like I just woke up to the idea. There's something about you now, Soph. You exude something and I can't quite place my finger on it. You practically glow with it. You devastate me, he said, clutching at his heart.
Fisher Amelie
#53. We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence,
For it is as the air, invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.
William Shakespeare
#54. To be cut down to size is good for all of us, but particularly so for those who forget how transient are our cultures and institutions, how pointless and cruel our divisions, how vain our claims to special status for our practices and beliefs above those of others.
Alexander McCall Smith
#55. Nor do I regret that I have lived, since I have so lived that I think I was not born in vain, and I quit life as if it were an inn, not a home.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#56. It is only those who do not know who wander the paths. A blind eye and a stout heart create a true wanderer. Those who seek the paths do so in vain; only those who can see deep might hope to wander.
Mary-Jean Harris
#57. Have you experienced so many things in vain? The argument from Christian experience was a wise one with which to begin, because Paul had been with them when they had trusted Christ.
Warren W. Wiersbe
#58. It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#59. I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear, or anything but that vain animal who is so proud of being rational.
John Wilmot
#60. In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.
Alain De Botton
#62. The worm doth woo the mortal, death claims a living bride,
Night unto day is married, morn unto eventide,
Earth a merry damsel, and heaven a knight so true,
And Earth is quite coquettish, and beseemeth in vain to sue.
Emily Dickinson
#63. Olivia Proudie, however, was a girl of spirit: she had the blood of two peers in her veins, and better still she had another lover on her books, so Mr. Slope sighed in vain, and the pair soon found it convenient to establish a mutual bond of inveterate hatred.
Anthony Trollope
#64. As we maintain the vigil of peace, we must remember that justice is a vigil, too-a vigil we must keep in our own streets and schools and among the lives of all our people-so that those
who died here on their native soil shall not have died in vain.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#65. Yes, one must suffer, even in vain, so as not to have lived in vain.
Antonio Porchia
#66. Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.
Mark Twain
#67. [W]ork at ridding yourself of the esteem you have had up to now for the glitter and sparkle of virtue and the vain applause of the world, which Our Lord so assiduously avoided and so often recommends us to shun, and that you labor in earnest to acquire true and solid virtues.
Vincent De Paul
#68. Providence has so ordained it, that only two women have a true interest in the happiness of a man
his own mother, and the mother of his children. Besides these two legitimate kinds of love, there is nothing between the two creatures except vain excitement, painful and vain delusion.
Octave Feuillet
#69. As a man may be eating all day, and for want of digestion is never nourished, so these endless readers may cram themselves in vain with intellectual food.
Isaac Watts
#70. He is born in vain, who having attained the human birth, so difficult to get, does not attempt to realize God in this very life.
Ramakrishna
#71. So the restless traveler long at last for his native soil, finds his cottage in the arms of his wife, in the affection of his children, labor necessary for their support, all the happiness which he sought in vain the wild world
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#72. Fernanda, on the other hand, looked for it in vain along the paths of her everyday itinerary without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#73. All that is deformed ought to be reformed. The Word of God alone teaches us what ought to be so, and all reform effected otherwise is vain.
Francis Lambert
#74. The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple
hate your enemy, know nothing of him.
Mccann Colum
#75. Is it that they think it a duty to be continually talking,' pursued she: 'and so never pause to think, but fill up with aimless trifles and vain repetitions when subjects of real interest fail to present themselves, or do they really take a pleasure in such discourse?
Emily Bronte
#76. Let us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#77. Sometimes women are so great and powerful, but then they surrender to these vain things. They kind of fall for it.
Lykke Li
#78. It was just that all the hope had been so empty, so meaningless. And if you prove to a man how vain his hope is, how vain his hoping was, you kill the bright, believing part of him that wants to be loved.
Gregory David Roberts
#79. What, start at this! when sixty years have spread. Their grey experience o'er thy hoary head? Is this the all observing age could gain? Or hast thou known the world so long in vain?
John Dryden
#80. Unfortunately, one mirror is as treacherous as another, reflecting at some point in every adventure the same vain unsatisfied face, and so when she asks what have I done? she means really what am I doing? as one usually does.
Truman Capote
#81. Words? I tell you not to write me letters; I command you. Is it not enough to want you so in vain, but you send me what evokes you here before me
this paper, all along whose lines your hand has lain?
Anne Reeve Aldrich
#82. Of course not, Drew. Why should you chase anyone, when you're so content to tlet everyone chase you?
Emma Chase
#83. I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the voice of God replied: I am not, either. I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare: one of the forms of my dream was you, who, like me, are many and one.
Jorge Luis Borges
#85. Men are vain; but they won't mind women working so long as they get smaller wages for the same job.
Irvin S. Cobb
#86. Babies are born because parents feel they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your own vain attempts to fill yours.
Melissa Broder
#87. The glitter of the great world, you know, is only so much froth and spume: you may look in vain for happiness there.
Jude Morgan
#88. To so perverse a sex all grace is vain.
John Dryden
#89. Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years!I am so weary of toil and of tears,-Toil without recompense, tears all in vain!Take them, and give me my childhood again!
Elizabeth Chase Allen
#90. It was a momentary laughter, in which our souls united. But I think there comes a point in love, a unique moment which later on the soul seeks in vain to surpass, and that the effort to revive such happiness depletes it; that nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.
Andre Gide
#91. Who ever planted an iroko tree - the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with greatness in men.
Chinua Achebe
#92. So let us here resolve that Dag Hammarskjold did not live, or die, in vain. Let us call a truce to terror. Let us invoke the blessings of peace. And, as we build an international capacity to keep peace, let us join in dismantling the national capacity to wage war.
John F. Kennedy
#93. The philosophers likewise assume that in Nature there is nothing in vain, so that everything that is not the product of human industry serves a certain purpose, which may be known or unknown to us.
Maimonides
#94. So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.
Helen Keller
#95. When I was younger, I was really vain about it. Zarina used to tease me that I looked at my reflection so much that one day the bogeyman was going to come and steal my face. (Adron)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#96. But in vain she did conjure him, To depart her presence so, Having a thousand tongues t' allure him And but one to bid him go. When lips invite, And eyes delight, And cheeks as fresh as rose in June, Persuade delay,
What boots to say Forego me now, come to me soon.
Walter Raleigh
#97. I understood very well just then, why it is that men measure time. They wish to fix a moment, in the vain hope that doing so will keep it from departing.
Diana Gabaldon
#98. This preparatory sort of idealism is the one that, as I just suggested, Berkeley made prominent, and, after a fashion familiar. I must state it in my own way, although one in vain seeks to attain novelty in illustrating so frequently described a view.
Josiah Royce
#99. Was he happy? One would ask that question in vain. A question like this makes sense only when applied to creatures who are rich in alternative possibilities, so that the actual truth can be contrasted with partly real probabilities and reflect itself in them.
Bruno Schulz
#100. If for just the time of a finger-snap a monk produces a thought of loving-kindness, develops it, gives attention to it, such a one is rightly called a monk. Not in vain does he meditate. He acts in accordance with the master's teaching, he follows his advice. How much more so if he cultivates it.
Gautama Buddha
