Top 46 Vanity Of The World Quotes
#1. Free and profound thought, which strives towards the comprehension of life, and a complete scorn for the foolish vanity of the world - man has never known anything higher than these two blessings.
Anton Chekhov
#2. It is sure that those are most desirous of honour or glory who cry out loudest of its abuse and the vanity of the world.
Baruch Spinoza
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. We are so presumptuous that we should like to be known all over the world, even by people who will only come when we are no more. Such is our vanity that the good opinion of half a dozen of the people around us gives us pleasure and satisfaction.
Blaise Pascal
#6. Beware of that demon called 'Changing The World'.
Marty Rubin
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#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. So much of writing is fed by vanity and the feeling that what you are doing is the most important thing in the world and it has not been done before and only you can do it. Without these feelings, many writers would not be able to write anything at all.
Pankaj Mishra
#13. Three-quarters of the expenditure of wit and the lies told out of vanity that have been squandered since the world began by people who in doing so merely diminish themselves have been squandered on inferiors.
Marcel Proust
#14. 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
#15. The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it.
Edward Abbey
#16. There is an enormous shadow industry of scammers and amateurs who prey on aspiring writers, who divert people from the real publishing industry into this shadow world of vanity publishing and fee-charging agents.
Victoria Strauss
#17. 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
#18. The peculiar vanity of man, who wants to believe and who wants other people to believe that he is seeking after truth, when in fact it is love that he is asking the world to give him.
Albert Camus
#19. Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#20. This poor world, the object of so much insane attachment, we are about to leave; it is but misery, vanity, and folly; a phantom
the very fashion of which passeth away.
Francois Fenelon
#22. 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
#23. Those who bequeath unto themselves a pompous funeral, are at just so much expense to inform the world of something that had much better be concealed; namely, that their vanity has survived themselves.
Charles Caleb Colton
#25. Vanity is the poison of agreeableness; yet as poison, when artfully and properly applied, has a salutary effect in medicine, so has vanity in the commerce and society of the world.
Sir Fulke Greville
#26. Goliath symbolizes the vanity and the illusions of this world. They disappear in a puff
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#27. Love is responsible for nearly every kind of insanity in the world though greed, vanity, and pure meanness contribute their portion to general misery.
P.N. Elrod
#28. 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
#29. When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.
W. Somerset Maugham
#30. Anyone can battle for pride, power, vanity, greed, or hate, but war should always be approached with an equal measure of wisdom and strength. It's not just enough to know when to fight, but to know when to lay down the sword and negotiate. Not everything in the world is worth fighting for.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#31. Foolish men always believe that a little knowledge will give them control over the world, but it is no more than a display of their vanity.
J. P. Vinluca
#32. 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
#33. All I have left is my anger at the foolishness of the world. The unnecessary cruelties, the pomposity and vanity of people who should know better. Most of the time I just want to shake some sense into the world.
Stephen Hunt
#34. Listen to your heart and not your ego. Your ego prompts you to boast of vain assertions to obtain the glory of this world. Turn away from vanity and seek Him in the recesses of your heart and soul
Abdul-Qadir Gilani
#35. The world is so rife with narcissists that none of them take enough notice of me.
Eleanor Bron
#36. To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.
Susan Sontag
#37. Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.
Abraham Cowley
#38. The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.
Michel De Montaigne
#39. 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
#40. [General-in-Chief of the army, Lieutenant General Winfield] Scott not only believed that the idea [for a battlefield decoration, to wit, a Medal of Honor, or valor] smacked of Old World vanity, elitism, and snobbery, he also thought that such an award was entirely unnecessary.
Russell S. Bonds
#41. Vanity calculates but poorly on the vanity of others; what a virtue we should distil from frailty, what a world of pain we should save our brethren, if we would suffer our own weakness to be the measure of theirs.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#42. The Chinese enjoyed the grim spectacle of death, Jim had decided, as a way of reminding themselves of how precariously they were alive. They liked to be cruel for the same reason, to remind themselves of the vanity of thinking that the world was anything else.
J.G. Ballard
#43. False humility is quite like the worst of both worlds: both that of Meekness and that of Conceit.
Criss Jami
#44. Job learned about the vanity of this world by losing it all; the Teacher {Qoheleth} saw it by having it all." (The Message of the Old Testament, p. 536)
Mark Dever
#45. Where do all the labyrinths of error in the world come from [the objector will continue], if not from the fact that when men follow their own minds they land in vanity and lies? So
John Calvin
#46. Comedy mocks the vanity of visions of rational control. The person who can joke amidst a confrontation with evil, like the quick-witted Spider-Man, must be reconciled to the permanent imperfections of a corrupted world populated by fallen creatures.
Peter Leithart
