Vanity Quotes - Page 29

• That something so obvious as the vanity of the world should be so little recognized that people find it odd and surprising to be told that it is foolish to seek greatness; that is most remarkable.

  Blaise Pascal

  Greatness, People, World

  Blaise Pascal (1966). “Pascal Pensées”, Penguin Classics

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• When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it.

  Idries Shah

  Prayer, Mean, Emotional

  Idries Shah (1991). “Seeker After Truth”, p.22, Octagon Press Ltd

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• Praise a fool, and slay him; for the canvas of his vanity is spread; His bark is shallow in the water, and a sudden gust shall sink it: Praise a wise man, and speed him on his way; for he carrieth the ballast of humility, And is glad when his course is cheered by the sympathy of brethren ashore.

  Martin Farquhar Tupper

  Wise, Humility, Men

  Martin Farquhar Tupper (1857). “Complete poetical works: containing: Proverbial philosophy, A thousand lines, Hactenus, Geraldine, and miscellaneous poems. With a portrait of the author”, p.90

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• All is vanity and everybody's vain. Women are terribly vain. So are men - more so, if possible.

  Jerome K. Jerome

  Men, Vain, Ifs

  Jerome K. Jerome (2014). “Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated)”, p.2421, Delphi Classics

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• The woman is the man's glory, and she naturally delights in the praises which are assurances that she is fulfilling her function; and she gives herself to him who succeeds in convincing her that she, of all others, is best able to discharge it for him. A woman without this kind of "vanity" is a monster.

  Coventry Patmore

  Women, Giving, Able

  Coventry Patmore (2016). “The Rod, the Root and the Flower”, p.20, Lulu.com

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• Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely.

  Bertrand Russell

  Power, Omnipotence, Insatiable

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.449, Routledge

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• I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.

  Bertrand Russell

  People, Would Be, Done

  Bertrand Russell (1969). “The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1872-1914”

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• We have looked first at man with his vanities and greed and his problems of a day or a year; and then only, and from this biased point of view, we have looked outward at the earth he has inhabited so briefly and at the universe in which our earth is so minute a part. Yet these are the great realities, and against them we see our human problems in a different perspective. Perhaps if we reversed the telescope and looked at man down these long vistas, we should find less time and inclination to plan for our own destruction.

  Rachel Carson

  Reality, Men, Views

  "Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson", edited by Linda Lear, (p. 91), 1999.

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• Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Running, Expression, Desire

  J. Robert Oppenheimer's letter to his brother Frank Oppenheimer (October 14, 1929), as quoted in "Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections" edited by Alice Kimball Smith (p. 136), 1995.

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• The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.

  Immanuel Kant

  Men, Numbers, Evil

  Immanuel Kant (1904). “The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant”

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• When you know too much information and you acquire it too easily, you tend to either use it in disagreeable ways, out of vanity, or you tend to be indiscriminate about it. I mean, in the old days, it was tricky, you had to go to various encyclopedias, you had to go to the library, maybe spend a day there, whatever. But in the end, if you found something, it was really exciting. Now you hit a couple of buttons and you get some information. Which, by the way, is almost always presented in that same goddamn mediocre style that characterizes the Internet for me. It is slightly deadening.

  Norman Mailer

  Couple, Mean, Style

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• I hate the countrie's dirt and manners, yet I love the silence; I embrace the wit; A courtship, flowing here in full tide. But loathe the expense, the vanity and pride. No place each way is happy.

  William Habington

  Country, Hate, Pride

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• Because arrogance is born in personal vanity, arrogant people are driven without mercy. They can never get enough power to fill the soul's needs or enough respect to overcome the fear that they deserve less than they are getting.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  People, Soul, Arrogance

  Lewis B. Smedes (1978). “Love Within Limits: Realizing Selfless Love in a Selfish World”, p.35, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• Remember that life holds out many pleasing deceits to us by the vanity of glory; for that when we are beginning to live, then we are dying. There is, therefore, nothing more profitless than ambition.

  Theophrastus

  Ambition, Dying, Deceit

  "The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers". Book by Diogenes Laërtius, transl. by C. D. Yonge, London: H. G. Bohn, p. 196, 1853.

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• We don't have to know,only to be:let go the jumble of worn words,reason and vanity.

  Hilda Doolittle

  Letting Go, Reason, Worn

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• Vanity as an impulse has without doubt been of far more benefit to civilization than modesty has ever been.

  William E. Woodward

  Civilization, Doubt, Benefits

  William E. Woodward (1946). “George Washington: The Image and the Man”

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• One is honest about oneself either with a sense of shame or with vanity.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Honest, Shame, Oneself

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Christopher Middleton (1996). “Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche”, p.46, Hackett Publishing

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• Envy is the reverse side of a coin called vanity - Nobody is ever envious of others who is not first proud of himself.

  John Stott

  Envy, Coins, Proud

  John Stott (2012). “The Cross of Christ”, p.57, InterVarsity Press

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• There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a bright-winged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that stretches its dreary length behind us.

  George Eliot

  Morning, Blessed, Angel

  George Eliot (2016). “Complete Works Of George Eliot”, p.133, ShandonPress

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• There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives--when the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and grey fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forget all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands.

  George Eliot

  Girl, Husband, War

  George Eliot (2009). “Daniel Deronda”, p.689, Oxford Paperbacks

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• Vanity is a desire of personal glory, the wish to be appreciated, honoured, and run after, not because of one's personal qualities, merits, and achievements, but because of one's individual existence. At best, therefore, it is a frivolous beauty whim it befits.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Running, Personal Qualities, Achievement

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2015). “Maxims and Reflections”, p.134, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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• A vain man is a nauseous creature: he is so full of himself that he has no room for anything else, be it never so good or deserving.

  William Penn

  Men, Rooms, Vain

  William Penn (1726). “A Collection of the Works of William Penn: To which is Prefixed a Journal of His Life, with Many Original Letters and Papers Not Before Published”, p.855

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• The market-place, the eager love of gain, Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain!

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Pain, Gains, Ends

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1988). “Selected Poems”, p.280, Penguin

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• Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

  Richard Dawkins

  Selfish, Goal, Finals

  Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.58, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Let pessimism once take hold of the mind, and life is all topsy-turvy, all vanity and vexation of spirit. There is no cure for individual or social disorder, except in forgetfulness and annihilation.

  Helen Keller

  Mind, Vexation, Spirit

  Helen Keller (2010). “The World I Live In and Optimism: A Collection of Essays”, p.102, Courier Corporation

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