We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavor to shine. We labor unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real.
Vanity is a vital aid to nature: completely and absolutely necessary to life. It is one of nature's ways to bind you to the earth.
Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.
Men have had the vanity to pretend that the whole creation was made for them, while in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence.
He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.
Vanity makes people ridiculous, pride odious, and ambition terrible.
Oh, the cares of men! how much emptiness there is in human concerns!
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.
Hair brings one’s self-image into focus; it is vanity’s proving ground. Hair is terribly personal, a tangle of mysterious prejudices
Gold is the gift of vanity and common pride, but flowers are the gift of love and friendship.
Vanity is a strong temptation to lying; it makes people magnify their merit, over flourish their family, and tell strange stories of their interest and acquaintance.
Surely in much talk there cannot choose but be much vanity. Loquacity is the fistula of the mind,--ever-running and almost incurable, let every man, therefore, be a Phocion or Pythagorean, to speak briefly to the point or not at all; let him labor like them of Crete, to show more wit in his discourse than words, and not to pour out of his mouth a flood of the one, when he can hardly wring out of his brains a drop of the other.
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.
Vanity is the most dangerous thing about fame.
If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself -- ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity -- before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly.
There are some who wish to learn for no other reason than that they may be looked upon as learned, which is ridiculous vanity. . . Others desire to learn that they may morally instruct others, that is love. And, lastly, there are some who wish to learn that they may be themselves edified; and that is prudence.
It's not vanity to know your own good points. It would just be stupidity if you didn't; It's only vanity when you get puffed up about them.
No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue.
Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence--and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.
Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.