Vanity Quotes

“Murderous, mutual loathing between tribes was no more explicable, or complicated, then the genocidal urges of chimpanzees—a fact of nature that we humans, vainly and disingenuously, pretend our codes of civilization transcend.”
― Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

“Spirituality destroys the ego. Religion strengthens it.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“People often confuse weak will with modesty, and vanity with dignity.”
― Tamuna Tsertsvadze

“Shyness is a symptom of and a punishment for thinking too little of and too much about yourself.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Beauty doesn't see itself and when it does something is lost.”
― Clifford Thurlow, Cocaine Confidence

“The power of female vanity should never be underestimated.”
― Anne Gisleson, The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading

“If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?”
― Vincent van Gogh

“The glorification of self-image is the pox that permeates all facets of America’s epoxy culture.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Your angles don't matter, if the posture of your heart isn't right.”
― Andrena Sawyer

“Pause, Mortal; Remember Vanity and Folly and Beware.”
― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

“When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, or clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.”
― Samuel Johnson, Dictionary Of The English Language

“The blessed lives of model-types, banking on the envy of the unwashed populace to earn their keep.”
― Mahvesh Murad, The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories

“It is the effects on the world of successful active germ-line replicators that we see as adaptations.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

“and once read a paper before our debating society to prove that it was better to be good-looking than to be good.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W.H.

“The question ‘How are you (doing)?’ is the most common way of indirectly saying ‘Ask me how I am (doing)’.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“An arrogant man forever thinks he can do much more than he can.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“An ego always looks at his face in the mirror never in his eyes.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Dear Superwoman, protect your tranquility and sanity. Remember that anything against authenticity is vanity.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, Woman of Virtue: Power-Filled Quotes for a Powerful Woman

“Sex, or masturbation, is the only experience that millions of people are able to truly enjoy, despite their knowing that it has not been, is not being, and will not be captured to be shared on social media.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you gotta give up the shit that weighs you down.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“All roads in this mystical world tragically lead to death. Every personal narrative repeats the same rhetorical trope. Memento mori (‘remember that you must die’) and memento mortis (‘remember death’) are the Latin medieval designation of the theory and practice of reflecting on mortality, pondering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits. The title to metaphysical poet John Donne’s poem Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris (‘Now, this Bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.’) expresses this sentiment of humankind’s painful morality and the interconnectedness of humanity. Remember death – that I must die – is my faithful traveling companion.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“...[W]e cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly... It may be that in the larger design of the universe this [calamity] is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence, the gifts to human science it has brought are enormous, and it has done much to promote the conception of the commonweal[th] of mankind.”
― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

“Mary secretly thinks she is pretty and therefore deserves to be loved.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“Without God, anything else is vanity.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, Daily Quotes about God: 365 Days of Heavenly Inspiration

“One of the main effects of social media is our confusing of someone’s obsession with their appearance with self-love or confidence.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Arrogance is just another form of selfishness.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Arrogance is lifelong ascending madness.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Και πρέπει ένα πράγμα να αναγνωρίσει κανείς στη ματαιοδοξία: βρίσκει πάντα ευφάνταστους τρόπους να σε κάνει να μετανιώσεις που την εμπιστεύτηκες.”
― Alessandro Piperno, Inseparabili

“To be counted writers, that they may hear applause, to be though and held Polymaths a& Polyhistors, toiling for a frothy name among the vulgar masses, to get a paper kingdom; from no hope of gain, but great hope of fame, in this precipitate ambitious age, and they that are scarce auditors, must be masters & teachers ('tis Scaliger's censure), before they be capable & fit hearers. They will rush into all learning, gowned, armed, divine, human authors, rake over all Indexes & Pamphlets for notes, as our merchants do strange havens for traffick, write great Tomes, when as they are not thereby better scholars, but greater praters. They commonly pretend publick good, but, as Gesner observes, 'tis pride and vanity that eggs them on, no news or ought worthy of note, but the same in other terms. They turn authors lest peradventure the printers should have a holiday; or they must write something to prove they have existed.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy Of Melancholy: What It Is, With All The Kindes, Causes, Symptomes, Progonosticks, And Severall Cures Of It. In Three Portions. With Their ... Medicinally, Historically Opened And

“It is impossible to love in vain. If you feel it was in vain, it was not love.”
― Ron Brackin