Vanity Quotes

“Social media has infected the world with a sickening virus called vanity.”
― Kellie Elmore

“Vanity, right?" Nash reappeared in the living room with an open bag of potato chips. "I nominate my venerable brother. He likes to play hero, and one look at him should establish the vanity angle."
"Nash!" I really shouldn't have been surprised by the dig. But I was.
"What?" He raised one brow at me in challenge. "It's okay to call me jealous, but not to call him vain?"
"Awareness of one's obvious advantages doesn't imply vanity," Tod insisted calmly.
Nash turned on him. "Does it imply narcissism?"
Tod huffed. "This coming from the guy who owns more hair products than his girlfriend.”
― Rachel Vincent, With All My Soul

“The Rose does not preen herself to catch my eye. She blooms because she blooms. A saint is a saint until he knows he is one.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietzsche.)
A vain person is always vain about something. He overestimates the importance of some quality or exaggerates the degree to which he possesses it, but the quality has some real importance and he does possess it to some degree. The fantasy of overestimation or exaggeration makes the vain person comic, but the fact that he cannot be vain about nothing makes his vanity a venial sin, because it is always open to correction by appeal to objective fact.

A proud person, on the other hand, is not proud of anything, he is proud, he exists proudly. Pride is neither comic nor venial, but the most mortal of all sins because, lacking any basis in concrete particulars, it is both incorrigible and absolute: one cannot be more or less proud, only proud or humble.

Thus, if a painter tries to portray the Seven Deadly Sins, his experience will furnish him readily enough with images symbolic of Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Anger, Avarice, and Envy, for all these are qualities of a person’s relations to others and the world, but no experience can provide an image of Pride, for the relation it qualifies is the subjective relation of a person to himself. In the seventh frame, therefore, the painter can only place, in lieu of a canvas, a mirror.”
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

“She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant, but because she thought that Lily disliked her. It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“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, Dark and Stormy Knights

“Then the cow asked:
"What is a mirror?"
"It is a hole in the wall," said the cat. "You look in it, and there you see the picture, and it is so dainty and charming and ethereal and inspiring in its unimaginable beauty that your head turns round and round, and you almost swoon with ecstasy.”
― Mark Twain, Short Stories

“Gracious Providence, to whom I owe all my powers, why didst thou not withhold some of those blessings I possess, and substitute in their place a feeling of self-confidence and contentment?”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“Don't worry about what others think about you; worry about what they think of themselves when they're with you.”
― Hilary Weeks

“Hairspray and blusher, eyelash curlers, eye-shadow palettes the size of tea-trays. Even before they left school it was as if they were already rehearsing for some witless kind of womanhood.”
― Alison Fell, The Element -inth in Greek

“[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

“My intellect was my greatest vanity.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“The moment men begin to care more for education than for religion they begin to care more for ambition than for education. It is no longer a world in which the souls of all are equal before heaven, but a world in which the mind of each is bent on achieving unequal advantage over the other. There begins to be a mere vanity in being educated whether it be self-educated or merely state-educated. Education ought to be a searchlight given to a man to explore everything, but very specially the things most distant from himself. Education tends to be a spotlight; which is centered entirely on himself. Some improvement may be made by turning equally vivid and perhaps vulgar spotlights upon a large number of other people as well. But the only final cure is to turn off the limelight and let him realize the stars.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“No-one loves another
More than he loves whatever
another within may have
That is part of one's self”
― Fernando Pessoa

“He wil sooner lose his best friend, then his least jest.”
― Ben Jonson, The Poetaster

“The physical vanity of the diet-and-exercise obsessive is recast as the pursuit of a kind of ritual purity, hedged about with taboos and guilt trips and mysticized by yoga.”
― Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

“In an earlier age, it might have been possible to believe that goodness would prevail over pride, but not anymore. The proud could be proud with impunity, because there was nobody to contradict him in his pride and because narcissism was no longer considered a vice. That was what the whole cult of celebrity was about, she thought; and we fêted these people and fed their vanity.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“SONG OF DAWN

I saw the sun rise by accident.
It was a horrible sight.
Annoyed by its splendor, I sought refuge
in a moist pillow, and lay there, alone,
at the dawn of another day,
that brought me closer to another death,
pondering the vanity of my solitude,
the vanity of procrastination,
and the tiresome inevitability of waking up
again the same person.
It might still be possible to change,
but obstinately I remain the same,
hoping that others might take solace
in my consistency.
But perhaps they take no solace in it,
perhaps they too find it tedious.”
― John Tottenham, Antiepithalamia: & Other Poems of Regret & Resentment

“I cried because I was so beautiful.”
― Victoria Kann, Pinkalicious

“Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do. And what is that compared to the magnificent uselessness of a woman's face? Mersault was aware of this now, delighting in his vanity and smiling at his secret demons.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“Vanity breeds insanity; humility leads to utility.”
― T. William Watts

“Mirror Mirror on the Wall,
Who's fairest of them all?
I'm Mona Lisa and She is plain,
But the truth is - we all are Vain.”
― Saru Singhal

“Don't be vain. What you look like doesn't matter. It's the deed that matters.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon

“But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less ready shall we be to make use of the word ‘artificial.’ Nothing in the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many works of art are branded with artificiality because the exhibit vanity and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a voice out of the abyss.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Five Types

“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

“But I feel vanity is a part of art and the non-vain are really non-artistic.”
― Barry Webster, The Sound of All Flesh

“Ecclesiastes would be quite unbearable were it not for Heavens eternity and its citizens".

~R. Alan Woods [2013]”
― R. Alan Woods, The Journey Is the Destination: A Book of Quotes With Commentaries

“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, Love Exactly

“A dead man’s vanity: his ashes full of life that cannot be deceased before a living being’s pride.”
― Munia Khan