Category

Vanity

Vanity is so secure in the heart of man that everyone wants to be admired: even I who write this, and you who read this. – Blaise Pascal

Vanity is the quicksand of reason. – George Sand

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness. – Thomas Wolfe

Pride that dines on vanity, sups on contempt. – Benjamin Franklin

There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it. – Mark Twain, Notebook, 1898

Without this ridiculous vanity that takes the form of self-display, and is part of everything and everyone, we would see nothing, and nothing would exist. – Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay. – François de la Rochefoucauld

Vanity, I am sensible, is my cardinal vice and cardinal folly; and I am in continual danger, when in company, of being led an ignis fatuus chase by it. – John Adams

There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth. – Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Cure yourself of the affliction of caring how you appear to others. Concern yourself only with how you appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have of you. – Miguel De Unamuno

To this principle of vanity, which philosophers call a mean one, and which I do not, I owe a great part of the figure which I have made in life. – Lord Chesterfield

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory. – Joseph Conrad

We speak little if not egged on by vanity. – François de la Rochefoucauld

The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity. – Henri Bergson

If vanity does not overthrow all our virtues, at least she makes them totter. – François de la Rochefoucauld

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty. – Louis Kronenberger

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

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man. – Robert Louis Stevenson

What makes the vanity of others insupportable is that it wounds our own. – François de la Rochefoucauld

Virtue would not go to such lengths if vanity did not keep her company. – François de la Rochefoucauld