Vanity Quotes

Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity, and their love to feed their pride.

Charles Caleb Colton

Those who live on vanity must, not unreasonably, expect to die of mortification.

Alice Thomas Ellis

It is better in some respects to be admired by those with whom you live, than to be loved by them. And this is not on account of any gratification of vanity, but because admiration is so much more tolerant than love.

Sir Arthur Helps

I have always found that angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.

William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell

To act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite beings. Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive.

James Boswell

If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living.

Leo Tolstoy

Vanity makes us do more things against inclination than reason.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption, too, after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth, to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to all.

Heinrich Heine

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bustling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

Dale Carnegie

But pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.

George Eliot, Middlemarch, Ch 8

One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Cowardice asks the question - Is it safe? Vanity asks the question - Is it popular? Expediency asks the question - Is it political? But conscience asks the question - Is it right? There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, popular, or political; but because it is right.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Wounded vanity knows when it is mortally hurt and limps off the field, piteous, all disguises thrown away. But pride carries its banner to the last and fast as it is driven from one field unfurls it in another, never admitting that there is a shade less honor in the second field than in the first, or in the third than in the second.

Helen Hunt Jackson

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

Logan Pearsall Smith

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

T. E. Lawrence

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.

Samuel Johnson

Cowardice asks the question - Is it safe? Expediency asks the question - Is it politic? Vanity asks the question - Is it popular? But conscience asks the question - Is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The general cry is against ingratitude, but the complaint is misplaced, it should be against vanity; none but direct villains are capable of willful ingratitude; but almost everybody is capable of thinking he hath done more that another deserves, while the other thinks he hath received less than he deserves.

Alexander Pope

The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.

T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Vanity is the quicksand of reason.

George Sands

The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead.

Sir George Savile

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

Lawrence of Arabia, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Suppressed introductory chapter, first published 1939, Penguin edition p. 23