Quotes and Sayings about Vanity
"Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief."
- Jane Austen
(Related: Vanity)
"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us."
- Jane Austen
(Related: Being, May, Opinion, Pride, Vanity, Words)
"Pampered vanity is a better thing perhaps than starved pride."
- Joanna Baillie
(Related: Pride, Vanity)
"The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity."
- Henri Bergson
(Related: Cure, Fault, Laughter, Vanity)
"If I have one vanity wish, it would be to direct. It's the only thing I haven't done yet that I would like to."
- Theodore Bikel
(Related: Vanity)
"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
(Related: Control, Energy, Fool, Trying, Vanity, Waste, Will)
"Fashion is so close in revealing a person's inner feelings and everybody seems to hate to lay claim to vanity so people tend to push it away. It's really too close to the quick of the soul."
- Stella Blum
(Related: Soul, People, Feelings, Fashion, Hate, Quick, Vanity)
"The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
(Related: Influence, Vanity)
"Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find it everywhere."
- Van Wyck Brooks
(Related: People, Jealousy, Vanity)
"Men blush less for their crimes than for their weaknesses and vanity."
- Jean de la Bruyere
(Related: Men, Blush, Vanity)
"There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth."
- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
(Related: Truth, Nothing, Skin, Vanity)
"The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance."
- Samuel Butler
(Related: Arrogance, Ignorance, Pride, Vanity)
"The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity."
- Thomas Carlyle
(Related: Life, Thought, Heart, Deeds, Man, Vanity)
"Vanity can easily overtake wisdom. It usually overtakes common sense."
- Julian Casablancas
(Related: Wisdom, Common sense, Vanity)
"The knowledge of yourself will preserve you from vanity."
- Miguel de Cervantes
(Related: Knowledge, Vanity, Will)
"The person is always happy who is in the presence of something they cannot know in full. A person as advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity."
- Nicolas de Chamfort
(Related: Difference, Morals, Pride, Study, Vanity)
"Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich."
- Nicolas de Chamfort
(Related: Change, Fashion, Tax, Poor, Vanity)
"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
(Related: Evening, Trees, Vanity)
"What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient but restless mind, of sacrificing one's ease or vanity, or uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully."
- Victor Cherbuliez
(Related: Love, Habit, Detail, Foresight, Luck, Mind, Vanity)
"Pleasure is a shadow, wealth is vanity, and power a pageant; but knowledge is ecstatic in enjoyment, perennial in frame, unlimited in space and indefinite in duration."
- DeWitt Clinton
(Related: Power, Knowledge, Wealth, Enjoyment, Pleasure, Shadow, Space, Vanity)
"I have this theory that people in Hollywood don't read. They read 'Vanity Fair' and then consider themselves terribly well read. I think I can basically write about anybody without getting caught."
- Jackie Collins
(Related: People, Hollywood, Theory)
"Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity, and their love to feed their pride."
- Charles Caleb Colton
(Related: Happiness, Love, Fashion, Ladies, Pride, Vanity)
"Call it vanity, call it arrogant presumption, call it what you wish, but I would grope for the nearest open grave if I had no newspaper to work for, no need to search for and sometimes find the winged word that just fits, no keen wonder over what each unfolding day may bring."
- Bob Considine
(Related: Work, Day, Grave, May, Open, Vanity, Wonder, Word)
"The day when a sportsman stops thinking above all else of the happiness in his own effort and the intoxication of the power and physical balance he derives from it, the day when he lets considerations of vanity or interest take over, on this day his ideal will die."
- Pierre de Coubertin
(Related: Happiness, Power, Balance, Day, Effort, Interest, Thinking, Vanity, Will)
"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
(Related: People, Knowledge, Virtue, Foolishness, Solitude, Vanity, World)
"I think it's good that people value their bodies and take care of them. I think if you cross the line and begin using your body as an asset or as an extension of your vanity, you've gone too far."
- Peter Coyote
(Related: People, Body, Care, Value, Vanity)
"But, after all, we are a young nation, and vanity is a fault of youth."
- Rebecca H. Davis
(Related: Fault, Nation, Vanity, Youth)
"The happy story right now is the full page in Vanity Fair, which gives me a great deal of exposure."
- Jackie DeShannon
(Related: Now, Right, Vanity)
"Well, there are more writers of blogs right now than there are readers, so that's clearly a vanity phenomenon."
- John Doerr
(Related: Now, Right, Vanity, Writers)
"Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return."
- George Eliot
(Related: Love, Indifference, Tenderness, Vanity)
"I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity."
- Gustave Flaubert
(Related: Conscience, Conviction, Vanity)
"For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better."
- E. M. Forster
(Related: Vanity)
"Who could look on these monuments without reflecting on the vanity of mortals in thus offering up testimonials of their respect for persons of whose very names posterity is ignorant?"
- Marguerite Gardiner
(Related: Monuments, Names, Posterity, Respect, Vanity)
"Vanity is as old as the mammoth."
- W. L. George
(Related: Old, Vanity)
"If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?"
- Vincent Van Gogh
(Related: Men, Ambition, Vanity, Youth)
"You know, at 35 or at 38 or 40 you really start to see what your body could look like if you just don't do anything all winter long. So that's another motivating factor, our vanity."
- Stone Gossard
(Related: Body, Vanity, Winter)
"Censorship is the height of vanity."
- Martha Graham
(Related: Censorship, Vanity)
"The vanity of loving fine clothes and new fashion, and placing value on ourselves by them is one of the most childish pieces of folly."
- Matthew Hale
(Related: Clothes, Fashion, Folly, Value, Vanity)
"There's a little vanity chair that Charlie gave me the first Christmas we knew each other. I'll not be parting with that, nor our bed - the four-poster - I'll be needing that to die in."
- Helen Hayes
(Related: Bed, Christmas, First, Parting, Vanity)
"Stupidity talks, vanity acts."
- Victor Hugo
(Related: Stupidity, Vanity)
"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
(Related: Curiosity, Grace, Vanity, Woman, Word)
"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
(Related: Content, Fools, Nothing, Vanity)
"The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it."
- Samuel Johnson
(Related: Being, Motives, Vanity)
"No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library."
- Samuel Johnson
(Related: Conviction, Public, Vanity)
"Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency."
- Franz Kafka
(Related: First, Vanity)
"If there is a single quality that is shared by all great men, it is vanity."
- Yousuf Karsh
(Related: Men, Quality, Vanity)
"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
(Related: Wisdom, Man, Vanity, Will)
"Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people."
- Garrison Keillor
(Related: Time, People, Greed, Vanity)
"They said this is Vanity Fair, and I said, Oh, I already take the magazine. They said Annie Leibovitz wants to take your picture and I thought, How nice!"
- Shirley Knight
(Related: Thought, Vanity)
"Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty."
- Louis Kronenberger
(Related: Fact, Modesty, Nothing, Vanity)
"A man's vanity tells him what is honor, a man's conscience what is justice."
- Walter Savage Landor
(Related: Conscience, Honor, Justice, Man, Vanity)
"God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything."
- David Herbert Lawrence
(Related: God, Hate, Old, Vanity)
"All men dream, but not 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 on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible."
- T. E. Lawrence
(Related: Dreams, Men, Act, Day, Eyes, May, Night, Open)
"There is something wrong about being photographed that has nothing to do with vanity."
- Nigella Lawson
(Related: Being, Nothing, Vanity, Wrong)
"I don't really lift weights. It's kind of a vanity thing that I don't get into."
- Jeremy London
(Related: Vanity)
"It's not vanity to feel you have a right to be beautiful. Women are taught to feel we're not good enough, that we must live up to someone else's standards. But my aim is to cherish myself as I am."
- Elle Macpherson
(Related: Women, Right, Vanity)
"By rendering the labor of one, the property of the other, they cherish pride, luxury, and vanity on one side; on the other, vice and servility, or hatred and revolt."
- James Madison
(Related: Hatred, Labor, Luxury, Pride, Property, Vanity, Vice)
"You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion."
- Gustav Mahler
(Related: Delusion, Superficiality, Vanity)
"The whole business is built on ego, vanity, self-satisfaction, and it's total crap to pretend it's not."
- George Michael
(Related: Business, Ego, Self, Vanity)
"Religion which is interested only in itself, in its prestige and success, in its institutions and ecclesiastical niceties, is worse than vanity; it is essentially incestuous."
- S. H. Miller
(Related: Religion, Success, Vanity)
"In the vanity of self-consciousness one feels at a long remove above the ordinary love and trustfulness of a simple and pure heart."
- Donald G. Mitchell
(Related: Love, Heart, Self, Vanity)
"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
(Related: Love, Sex, Flattery, Vanity)
"The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing."
- Michel de Montaigne
(Related: Nothing, Play, Shadow, Vanity, Word, World)
"There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly."
- Michel de Montaigne
(Related: Obvious, Vanity)
"Large parties given to very young children... foster the passions of vanity and envy, and produce a love of dress and display which is very repulsive in the character of a child."
- Susanna Moodie
(Related: Love, Character, Children, Dress, Envy, Vanity)
"A pretty wife is something for the fastidious vanity of a rougue to retire upon."
- Thomas Moore
(Related: Wife, Pretty, Vanity)
"I believe firmly that it was the Almighty's goodness, to check my consummate vanity."
- Lord Mountbatten
(Related: Goodness, Vanity)
"I have a lot of vanity."
- Jack Nicholson
(Related: Vanity)
"Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
(Related: Pride, Vanity)
"Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
(Related: Women, Contempt, Vanity, Woman)
"When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity - but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial."
- Eugene O'Neill
(Related: Love, Thought, People, Losing, Old, Thinking, Vanity)
"Vanity is my favourite sin."
- Al Pacino
(Related: Sin, Vanity)
"The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy."
- Blaise Pascal
(Related: Cause, Consciousness, Ignorance, Present, Vanity)
"Vanity is but the surface."
- Blaise Pascal
(Related: Vanity)
"Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science."
- Blaise Pascal
(Related: Science, Time, Morality, Knowledge, Affliction, Ignorance, Vanity, Will)
"Now, being on the cover of Vanity Fair is as important as being in great movies. The lines are very, very blurred."
- Jason Patric
(Related: Movies, Being, Now, Vanity)
"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
(Related: Now, Vanity)
"The basis of tragedy is man's helplessness against disease, war and death; the basis of comedy is man's helplessness against vanity (the vanity of love, greed, lust, power)."
- Dawn Powell
(Related: War, Love, Death, Comedy, Disease, Greed, Lust, Man, Tragedy, Vanity)
"How can anybody learn anything from an artwork when the piece of art only reflects the vanity of the artist and not reality?"
- Lou Reed
(Related: Art, Artist, Reality, Vanity)
"Virtue would go far if vanity did not keep it company."
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
(Related: Virtue, Company, Vanity)
"What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given."
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
(Related: Generosity, Giving, Vanity)
"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
(Related: Jealousy, Pain, Shame, Vanity)
"What we call generosity is for the most part only the vanity of giving; and we exercise it because we are more fond of that vanity than of the thing we give."
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
(Related: Exercise, Generosity, Giving, Vanity)
"We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own."
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
(Related: People, Patience, Vanity)
"We say little, when vanity does not make us speak."
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
(Related: Vanity)
"Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead."
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
(Related: Honor, Living, Vanity)
"Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency."
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
(Related: Money, Flattery, Vanity)
"Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay."
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
(Related: Pride, Vanity)
"She gave up beauty in her tender youth, gave all her hope and joy and pleasant ways; she covered up her eyes lest they should gaze on vanity, and chose the bitter truth."
- Christina Rossetti
(Related: Beauty, Truth, Hope, Eyes, Joy, Vanity, Youth)
"Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood - we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we."
- Jean Rostand
(Related: Faith, Cruelty, Direction, Falsehood, Stupidity, Vanity)
"The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity."
- Jean Jacques Rousseau
(Related: English, Pride, Vanity)
"The woman who appeals to a man's vanity may stimulate him, the woman who appeals to his heart may attract him, but it is the woman who appeals to his imagination who gets him."
- Helen Rowland
(Related: Imagination, Heart, Man, May, Vanity, Woman)
"Vanity is the quicksand of reason."
- George Sand
(Related: Reason, Vanity)
"The highest form of vanity is love of fame."
- George Santayana
(Related: Love, Fame, Vanity)
"The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead."
- George Savile
(Related: Forget, Man, Teaching, Vanity)
"I have been vain since birth. I expected other people to like what I did, although my vanity has definitely diminished over the years."
- Wallace Shawn
(Related: People, Vanity, Years)
"For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse - why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!"
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
(Related: Friend, Abuse, Praise, Vanity)
"Vanity is a vital aid to nature: completely and absolutely necessary to life. It is one of nature's ways to bind you to the earth."
- Elizabeth Smart
(Related: Life, Nature, Earth, Vanity)
"Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast."
- Logan P. Smith
(Related: Vanity)
"They sin who tell us Love can die: with Life all other passions fly, all others are but vanity."
- Robert Southey
(Related: Life, Love, Sin, Vanity)
"The vanity of men, a constant insult to women, is also the ground for the implicit feminine claim of superior sensitivity and morality."
- Patricia Meyer Spacks
(Related: Men, Women, Morality, Insult, Sensitivity, Vanity)
"I imagine my children are going to save me from my vanity and be my passion and fill whatever fears I have of the amazing time I'm having right now being gone."
- Gwen Stefani
(Related: Time, Being, Children, Now, Passion, Right, Vanity)
"Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
(Related: Man, Vanity)
"Our vanity is the constant enemy of our dignity."
- Anne Sophie Swetchine
(Related: Dignity, Enemy, Vanity)
"Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride."
- Jonathan Swift
(Related: Humility, Pride, Vanity)
"Whatever talents I possess may suddenly diminish or suddenly increase. I can with ease become an ordinary fool. I may be one now. But it doesn't do to upset one's own vanity."
- Dylan Thomas
(Related: Fool, May, Now, Vanity)
"Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain - at least in a poor country like Russia - and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect."
- Leon Trotsky
(Related: America, Country, Effect, Man, Poor, Russia, Vanity)
"It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions."
- Mark Twain
(Related: Dumb, Man, Perceptions, Vanity)
"I think the industry is oblivious to the fact that most people listen to all kinds of stuff. I personally don't know of anyone who listens to only one genre of music. It's vanity because no one does."
- Keith Urban
(Related: Music, People, Fact, Vanity)
"I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity."
- Diana Vreeland
(Related: Vanity)
"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
(Related: Culture, Vanity)
"The surest cure for vanity is loneliness."
- Tom Wolfe
(Related: Cure, Loneliness, Vanity)
"There is nothing can pay one for that invaluable ignorance which is the companion of youth, those sanguine groundless hopes, and that lively vanity which makes all the happiness of life."
- Mary Wortley
(Related: Happiness, Life, Ignorance, Nothing, Vanity, Youth)
"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
(Related: Funny, Now, Vanity)
"To boast of a performance which I cannot beat is merely stupid vanity. And if I can beat it that means there is nothing special about it. What has passed is already finished with. What I find more interesting is what is still to come."
- Emil Zatopek
(Related: Performance, Nothing, Vanity)