Vanity Quotes - Page 28

• Is the artist impelled by spiritual forces, by the divine afflatus, by conscious or unconscious emulation of others? Do angles whisper in the ears of the chosen few, and create for them visions of aethereal beauty? Do landscape painters of genius walk the plains of Heaven? Or is it only vanity that urges him to paint?

  Walter J. Phillips

  Spiritual, Artist, Heaven

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• While you are still beautiful and life still woos, it is such a fine gesture of disdainful pride to jilt it.

  Eugene O'Neill

  Beautiful, Pride, Gestures

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• The expression of vanity and self-love becomes less offensive, when it retains something of simplicity and frankness.

  Alexander von Humboldt

  Self, Expression, Simplicity

  Alexander von Humboldt, Aimè Bonpland (1852). “Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799-1804”, p.415

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• How are you to meet the swarm of foolish attachments, triflings, and undesirable inclinations which beset you? By turning sharply away, and thoroughly renouncing such vanities, flying to the Saviour's Cross, and clasping His Crown of thorns to your heart, so that these little foxes may not spoil your vines. Beware of entering into any manner of treaty with the Enemy; do not delude yourself by listening to him while intending to reject him.

  Saint Francis de Sales

  Heart, Attachment, Flying

  Saint Francis de Sales, Catholic Way Publishing (2015). “The Saint Francis de Sales Collection [16 Books]”, p.249, Catholic Way Publishing

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• Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. Jealousy we understood and thought natural--a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange, new feeling for us.

  Jim Morrison

  Envy, Feelings, Desire

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• Never permit yourself to indulge in cheap flattery, which often times means to merely satisfy the individuals vanity and sometimes to ingratiate the flatter into the good graces of the flattered.

  Harold B. Lee

  Kindness, Mean, Indulge In

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• Oh God, God, please come to me, please illumine me, please act in me and through me. I don't know what's right and what's wrong. I can't tell anymore. I could be doing what I feel is right and perhaps I'm deceiving myself. Perhaps it's all my ego and my vanity. Please show me what's right or don't even show me. Please just do it, whether it brings me happiness or unhappiness, riches or poverty, sorrow or joy. Please act in and through me. I love only you.

  Frederick Lenz

  Yoga, Joy, Ego

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• We hide in relationships. We hide in material possessions. We hide in ambitions, secret desires, hates, frustrations, jealousy, self-ptiy, in our insecurity - and more than anything our vanity and our egotism.

  Frederick Lenz

  Karma, Hate, Yoga

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• What's so wrong with vanity? It's different from narcissism, you know? It's not about admiring yourself-it's about taking pride in your appearance.

  Tom Ford

  Pride, Different, Narcissism

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• Everybody in Vanity Fair must have remarked how well those live who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt; how they deny themselves nothing; how jolly and easy they are in their minds.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Mind, Debt, Easy

  William Makepeace Thackeray (1853). “Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero”, p.177

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• To be happy one must be (a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, (b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men, and (c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste. It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am - a man of my peculiar weakness, vanities, appetites, and aversions - can be so happy as he can be in the United States.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Men, Zion

  "On Being An American". Book by H. L. Mencken, 1922.

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• Vanity is a mortgage that must be deducted from the value of a man.

  Otto von Bismarck

  Men, Mortgage, Values

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• When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, exploring and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called “licking the earth.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Exercise, Self, Seductive

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• But, as I understand it, your God is a universal God; He is God on all suns and all planets. Surely, then, He must have universal form? Would it not be a staggering vanity to imagine that He can manifest Himself only in the form that is appropriate to this particular, not very important planet?

  John Wyndham

  Important, Sun, Imagine

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• Our vanity would have just that which we do best count as that which is hardest for us. The origin of many a morality.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Morality, Hardest

  "Beyond Good and Evil" by Friedrich Nietzsche. Aphorism 143, 1886.

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• It is a disgrace to let ignorance and vanity do more with us than prudence and principle.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Ignorance, Principles, Prudence

  Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) (1887). “The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius”

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• Vanity is both a great motivator and a great deceiver.

  Andrew Davidson

  Deceiver

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• One of the main goals of self-education is to eradicate that vanity in us without which we would never have been educated.

  Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

  Self, Goal, Educated

  "Aphorisms". Book by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1880-1893.

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• A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.

  Honore de Balzac

  Girl, Women, Thinking

  Honore de Balzac (1897). “A Woman of Thirty”, p.172, Library of Alexandria

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• 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

  Book, Writing, Men

  "The New Industrial State". Foreword to the book by John Kenneth Galbraith, p. 7, 1967.

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• When we hear complaints of the wretchedness or vanity of human life, the proper answer to them would be that there is hardly any one who at some point or other has not been in love. If we consider the high abstraction of this feeling, its depth, its purity, its voluptuous refinement, even in the meanest breast, how sacred and how sweet it is, this alone may reconcile us to the lot of humanity. That drop of balm turns the bitter cup to a delicious nectar.

  William Hazlitt

  Love, Sweet, Feelings

  William Hazlitt (1871). “The Round Table. A collection of Essays ... By W. H. and Leigh Hunt”, p.507

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• Vanity does not refer to the opinion a man entertains of himself, but to that which he wishes others to entertain of him.

  William Hazlitt

  Men, Wish, Doe

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1480, Delphi Classics

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• Any woman may act the part of a coquette successfully who has the reputation without the scruples of modesty. If a woman passes the bounds of propriety for our sakes, and throws herself unblushingly at our heads, we conclude it is either from a sudden and violent liking, or from extraordinary merit on our parts, either of which is enough to turn any man's head who has a single spark of gallantry or vanity in his composition.

  William Hazlitt

  Women, Coquette, May

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• Aristocracy has three successive ages. First superiority s, then privileges and finally vanities. Having passed from the first, it degenerates in the second and dies in the third.

  Bill Vaughan

  Age, Aristocracy, Three

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• Quomondo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

  Evelyn Waugh

  "Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder". Book by Evelyn Waugh, 1945.

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