Vanity Quotes

1. "All success in life comes to naught if it is laced with vanity."
Author: Andy Paula

2. "For it is a matter of daily observation that people take the greatest pleasure in that which satisfies their vanity; and vanity cannot be satisfied without comparison with others."
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

3. "Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning."
Author: Arundhati Roy

4. "Sleep erases all differences: then and now; dead and living. I am past hunger, past vanity, past caring. This morning I caught sight of my face in the bathroom mirror. I am paperskinned, gauned, yellow, ring-eyed, hait matted. I look dead. I want nothing."
Author: Audrey Niffenegger

5. "The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite—on calories and portion size and what's going into the body versus what's being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel—keeps the larger, more fearsome questions of desire blurred and out of focus. American women spend approximately $1 million every hour on cosmetics. This may or may not say something about female vanity, but it certainly says something about female energy, where it is and is not focused. Easier to worry about the body than the soul, easier to fit the self into the narrow slots of identity our culture offers to women than to create one...that allows for the expression of all passions, the satisfaction of all appetites. The great preoccupation with things like food and shopping and appearance, in turn, is less of a genuine focus on hunger—indulging it, understanding it, making decisions about it—than it is a monumental distraction from hunger."
Author: Caroline Knapp

6. "The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity."
Author: Colum McCann

7. "In their vanity men focus on what they wish to hear and miss the hidden meaning, the lurking threat."
Author: David Hewson

8. "If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity."
Author: Don DeLillo

9. "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."
Author: Edith Wharton

10. "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."
Author: Emil Zatopek

11. "When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he pondered o'er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever know, he rhymed her eyes with life and death:"Thru Time I'll save my love!" he said. . . yet Beauty vanished with his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead. . .-Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair:"Who'd learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his sonnet there". . . So all my words, however true, might sing you to a thousandth June, and no one ever know that you were Beauty for an afternoon."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

12. "Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of man, without his vices. This praise, which would be unmeaning flattery if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just tribute to the memory of Botswain, a dog."
Author: George Gordon Byron

13. "It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity"
Author: Gilles Deleuze

14. "The great are deceived if they imagine they have appropriated ambition and vanity to themselves. These notable qualities flourish as notably in a country church and churchyard as in the drawing room or in the closet. Schemes have indeed been laid in the vestry, which would hardly disgrace the conclave. Here is a ministry, and here is an opposition. Here are plots and circumventions, parties and factions equal to those which are to be found in courts. Nor are the women here less practiced in the highest feminine arts than their fair superiors in quality and fortune. Here are prudes and coquettes; here are dressing and ogling, falsehood, envy, malice, scandal -- in short everything which is common to the most splendid assembly or politest circle."
Author: Henry Fielding

15. "When it comes to naming things, vanity and flattery are dull motivations best suited for deciding on a child's middle name. Much more interesting are the descriptive names that suggest a story or happening of interest."
Author: J. Maarten Troost

16. "Lady Jane Gray, who tho' inferior to her lovely Cousin the Queen of Scots, was yet an amiable young woman & famous for reading Greek while other people were hunting....Whether she really understood that language or whether such a study proceeded only from an excess of vanity for which I beleive she was always rather remarkable, is uncertain."
Author: Jane Austen

17. "If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark. There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost any attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin ‘freely'- as light preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have a heart enough to be really in love without encouragement."
Author: Jane Austen

18. "There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all BEGIN freely--a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. In nine cases out of ten a women had better show MORE affection than she feels. Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on."
Author: Jane Austen

19. "Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride - where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation."
Author: Jane Austen

20. "Like pets, I name my leftover food. Only I name them all after myself, partly so my coworkers won't eat them in the fridge, but mostly out of vanity."
Author: Jarod Kintz

21. "An injured lion wants to know if he can still roar. It's about dignity and self-esteem, which isn't quite the same as vanity."
Author: Jeffrey Zaslow

22. "There's no way out," he announced with satisfaction, "and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one. The demon won't go back in its bottle, the face-off is for ever, the embrace gets tighter and the toys cleverer with every generation, and there's no such thing for either side as enough security. Not for the main players, not for the nasty little newcomers who each year run themselves up a suitcase bomb and join the club. We get tired of believing that, because we're human. We may even con ourselves into believing the threat has gone away. It never will. Never, never, never.""So, who'll save us then, Walt?" Barley asked. "You and Nedsky?""Vanity, if anything will, which I doubt," Walter retorted. "No leader wants to go down in history as the ass who destroyed his country in an afternoon. And funk, I suppose. Most of our gallant politicians do have a narcissistic objection to suicide, thank God."
Author: John Le Carré

23. "Miss Aubrey, come and have pity on us. We are reading novels and feel our manliness diminishing by the moment. Come restore our vanity, do, and tell us we look the dashing officers we once were."
Author: Julie Klassen

24. "You don't get the pint, Woodrow, I've walked the earth in my pride all these years. If that's lost, then let the rest be lost with it. There's certain things my vanity won't abide."
Author: Larry McMurtry

25. "Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet."
Author: Margaret Atwood

26. "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?"
Author: Marguerite Gardiner

27. "Censorship is the height of vanity."
Author: Martha Graham

28. "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."
Author: Mccann Colum

29. "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."
Author: Michael Zaslow

30. "But I must admit that my motives were no entirely noble; there were in me at least some elements of the anger and hurt vanity that characterize a spurned lover, and these unworthy sentiments helped me to keep my distance."
Author: Mohsin Hamid

31. "I'm not sure if guys are supposed to read Vanity Fair. I feel very metrosexual with it but am not sure it's in my comfort zone."
Author: Mohsin Hamid

32. "To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity."
Author: Napoleon

33. "Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account."
Author: Oscar Wilde

34. "Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day."
Author: Oscar Wilde

35. "He was like some prophet of old, scourging the sins of the people. He leaped about in a frenzy of inspiration till I feared he would do himself an injury. Sometimes he expressed himself in a somewhat odd manner, but every word carried conviction. He showed me New York in its true colours. He showed me the vanity and wickedness of sitting in gilded haunts of vice, eating lobster when decent people should be in bed.'He said that the tango and the fox-trot were devices of the devil to drag people down into the Bottomless Pit. He said that there was more sin in ten minutes with a negro banjo orchestra than in all the ancient revels of Nineveh and Babylon. And when he stood on one leg and pointed right at where I was sitting and shouted "This means you!" I could have sunk through the floor."
Author: P.G. Wodehouse

36. "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."
Author: Pierre De Coubertin

37. "Such lavish devotion made me proud to think that the wealth was all my own which drove you to my gate. But vanity such as this only checks the flow of free surrender in a woman's love. When I sit on he queen's throne and claim homage, then the claim only goes on magnifying itself; it is never satisfied. Can there be any real happiness for a woman in merely feeling that she has power over a man? To surrender one's pride in devotion is woman's only salvation."
Author: Rabindranath Tagore

38. "But, after all, we are a young nation, and vanity is a fault of youth."
Author: Rebecca Harding Davis

39. "…the particular consequence of his moral vanity was that when he did people an injury, he never forgave them. Never again."
Author: Renata Adler

40. "They sin who tell us Love can die: with Life all other passions fly, all others are but vanity."
Author: Robert Southey

41. "In reference to Persepolis and all palaces, cities and temples of the past: could these wonders have come into being without that suffering? without the overseer's whip, the slave's fear, the ruler's vanity? was not the monumentality of past epochs created by that which is negative and evil in man?"
Author: Ryszard Kapuściński

42. "The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance."
Author: Samuel Butler

43. "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."
Author: Stella Blum

44. "Lets say from the first moment of my life, everything's always been about me and nothing else, including apocalypse and chaos; let's say even apocalypse and chaos have been conceits of my psyche and bad faith--this assumes I ever kept any kind of faith at all, bad or otherwise...Let's say I'm faithlessness made flesh, the modern age's leap of faith stopped dead in its tracks, fucking around with apocalypse and chaos only because in some broken part of me, among any wreckage of honor or altruism or commitment of compassion, or the bits and pieces of moral vanity, I really believed the abyss was always just the playground of my imagination, and I was its bully."
Author: Steve Erickson

45. "This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat. Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The impossibility of the old version's vanishing."
Author: Sue Miller

46. "Christ has redeemed our humanity from vanity and our time from illusion."
Author: T.F. Torrance

47. "The surest cure for vanity is loneliness."
Author: Tom Wolfe

48. "Vanity occurs when we think we are invincible. Death occurs to tell us we are not."
Author: Vinita Kinra

49. "So there was splendour and wealth, but no great happiness perchance, behind the tall caned portals of Gaunt House with its smoky coronets and ciphers. The feasts there were of the grandest in London, but there was not overmuch content therewith, except among the guests who sat at my lord's table. Had he not been so great a Prince very few possibly would have visited him; but in Vanity Fair the sins of very great personages are looked at indulgently."
Author: William Makepeace Thackeray

50. "Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!O any thing, of nothing first create!O heavy lightness, serious vanity,Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!This love feel I, that feel no love in this."
Author: William Shakespeare

Vanity Quotes Pictures