Best 483 quotes in «vanity quotes» category

You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else - to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don't know - because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around over your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose. You can hold up another mirror to see the back view, but then what you see is what so many painters have loved to paint - Woman Looking In Mirror, said to be an allegory of vanity. Though it is unlikely to be vanity, but the reverse: a search for flaws. What is it about me? can so easily be construed as What is wrong with me?

You have people out here trying to tell you to accept imperfections and that nobody is perfect (except for a dead/make-believe entity?) but if you are telling yourself that you are not perfect, aren't you downgrading your own character? Why would you keep telling yourself you are less than what you are? Why destroy your pride? People, raise your heads and gain some vanity. If you are the best in the world at what you do, and the best in the world in who you are, you are certainly perfect. The only way you are not perfect, is if you let everyone fool you into believing you are not perfect; that you are the same as everyone else - less than what you are and could be.

You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died. Such souls belong here, because they would find no peace elsewhere. In this place, they are understood. In this place, their faults have meaning. In this place, they belong.

You must intercept the passing time well, hence it will fly away into vanity.

You must never marry. Don’t, I do earnestly beg of you, allow yourself to be taken in by any lure thrown out to you! You cannot hope to find a lady who will like you better than you like yourself.

You rely on your speed too much. A young man's vanity. An old man learns to absorb pain and wait for an opportunity.

Your house was not yours, but your late father’s, and his pool was almost as shallow as I was when I asked if you thought I looked good [...] Your bedroom walls were covered in pictures, and your shag carpet was almost as green as I was when I realized I wasn’t the only one being hurt.

Your time keeps flying away into vanity while you dine with your distractions.

And I have yet to find one single individual who has attained conspicuous success in bringing down enemy aeroplanes who can be said to be spoiled either by his successes or by the generous congratulations of his comrades. If he were capable of being spoiled he would not have had the character to have won continuous victories, for the smallest amount of vanity is fatal in aeroplane fighting. Self-distrust rather is the quality to which many a pilot owes his protracted existence.

You don't know how shallow you are, or how narcissistic, until you acquire a facial scar. On the plus side, it's so situated as to make me look tough and worldly. On the downside, I'm never kissing my dog again.

Your greatest regrets in life will not come from your past failures; they would come from remembering the amount of time you spent in pursuing vain things.

Your time keeps flying away into vanity while you dine with your distractions. Your life keeps diminishing while you waste your time feeding your distractions.

All men are selfish, but the vain man is in love with himself. He admires, like the lover his adored one, everything which to others is indifferent.

Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.

Anxieties about ourselves endure. If our proper study is indeed the study of humankind, then it has seemed-and still seems-to many that the study is dangerous. Perhaps we shall find out that we were not what we took ourselves to be. But if the historical development of science has indeed sometimes pricked our vanity, it has not plunged us into an abyss of immorality. Arguably, it has liberated us from misconceptions, and thereby aided us in our moral progress.

A pretty wife is something for the fastidious vanity of a roue to retire upon.

Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.

Any fear of aging, I think, is simply vanity.

As regards this vice, we read that the peacock is more guilty of it than any other animal. For it is always contemplating the beauty of its tail, which it spreads in the form of a wheel, and by its cries attracts to itself the gaze of the creatures that surround it. And this is the last vice to be conquered.

At my funeral, if one said, 'Nick was a generous person,' trust me I won't be doing cartwheels in my coffin. Recognition from people is never and never will be a goal. Some people strive for that respect or honor. Living a life to just reach for the position and status is vanity and sin.

Aside from my love of animation, as an actor I like the total lack of vanity in terms of not having to worry at all about your appearance. You don't have to deal with hair or makeup or wardrobe.

(A unified) 'Europe' is the result of plans. It is, in fact, a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure: only the scale of the final damage done is in doubt.

Because handsomeness is always accompanied by vanity.And I suppose ugliness is accompanied by a wealth of virtues?

'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God' suggested to me a heavenly welfare program for the meek. Today that saying reveals an astute insight into egotism, about how those with swollen pride or vanity cannot see anything larger than themselves.

By mortifying vanity we do ourselves no good. It is the want of interest in our life which produces it; by filling up that want of interest in our life we can alone remedy it.

Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.

A philosopher may deplore the eternal discords of the human race, but he will confess, that the desire of spoil is a more rational provocation than the vanity of conquest.

But the fact of it was that I liked it out there, a ruin devoid of human vanities, clean of human illusions, an empty place reclaimed by the weather where a woman plays an organ to stop the wind's whining and an old man plays ball with a dog named Duke. I could tell you that I came back because I had promises to keep, but maybe it was because nobody asked me to stay.

Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled.

By rendering the labor of one, the property of the other, they cherish pride, luxury, and vanity on one side; on the other, vice and servility, or hatred and revolt.

Curiosity is nothing more than vanity. More often than not we only seek knowledge to show it off.

Eternity to a child offers goodness, and eternal life to a man is essentially corrupting because it involves a certain amount of vanity to embrace it.

Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good inflammable stuff, it will catch fire.

Euler calculated the force of the wheels necessary to raise the water in a reservoir ... My mill was carried out geometrically and could not raise a drop of water fifty yards from the reservoir. Vanity of vanities! Vanity of geometry!

Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.

Europe is... a monument to the vanity of individuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure.

Do not confuse understanding with a larger vocabulary, sacred writings are beneficial in stimulating desire for inward realization, if one stanza at a time is slowly assimilated. Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge.

Every noble action is selfish. Some selfish actions are nobler than others. But they are all selfish. And as such there can be no action purely noble anyway. Even the nobility in God's great philosophical intentions is bounded by his vanity.

False modesty is the refinement of vanity. It is a lie.

Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

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.

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. Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us. Don't be into trends. Don't make fashion own you, but you decide what you are, what you want to express by the way you dress and the way you live. Fashion should be a form of escapism, and not a form of imprisonment.

Everyone in Annawadi talks like this: 'Oh, I will make my child a doctor, a lawyer, and he will make us rich'. It's vanity, nothing more. Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, 'what a navigator I am!' And then the wind blows you east.

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

God gave us laughter, I think, as a balm to wash the wounds of our own blunders, as a splint to mend the bones we break in our rashness or vanity.

He [the miser] falls down and worships the god of this world, but will have neither its pomps, its vanities nor its pleasures for his trouble.

Honor is decency without vanity.

Fruits are always of the same nature with the seeds and roots from which they come, and trees are known by the fruits they bear: as a man begets a man, and a beast a beast, that society of men which constitutes a government upon the foundation of justice, virtue, and the common good, will always have men to promote those ends; and that which intends the advancement of one man's desire and vanity, will abound in those that will foment them.

I appreciate people who are civil, whether they mean it or not. I think: Be civil. Do not cherish your opinion over my feelings. There's a vanity to candor that isn't really worth it. Be kind.

How can anybody learn anything from an artwork when the piece of art only reflects the vanity of the artist and not reality?