Vanity Quotes - Page 12

• Why do you beat the air and run in vain? Every occupation has a purpose, obviously. Tell me then, what is the purpose of all the activity of the world? Answer, I challenge you! It is vanity of vanity: all is vanity.

  Saint John Chrysostom

  Christian, Running, Air

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• I think a lot of female actors have a real fear of not looking their best. They learn to prize their vanity over a role in which they have to look like a moron. They're worried they'll damage their sex appeal. Thankfully, I have no problem looking like a moron!

  Emma Stone

  Sex, Real, Thinking

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• Sharing holiday snaps on social media is an act of arrogant vanity.

  Jeremy Paxman

  Holiday, Media, Arrogant

  Source: www.ft.com

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• The most effectual way to be deceived is to believe oneself more cunning than one's neighbors.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Believe, Deception, Way

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• A good stylist should have narcissistic enjoyment as he works. He must be able to objectivize his work to such an extent that he catches himself feeling envious and has to jog his memory to find that he is himself the creator. In short, he must display that highest degree of objectivity which the world calls vanity.

  Karl Kraus

  Memories, Objectivity, Should Have

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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• There's a little vanity chair that Charlie gave me the first Christmas we knew each other. I'll not be parting with that, nor our bed - the four-poster - I'll be needing that to die in.

  Helen Hayes

  Christmas, Bed, Four

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• I write about this in The Last Temple, the early church knew that Christ has risen from the dead, and so they didn't live their lives with earthly vanities, but they lived their lives for eternal verities. And I think that if we might catch that enthusiasm and the reality of resurrection, we would live by a completely different standard as well.

  Hank Hanegraaff

  Writing, Thinking, Reality

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• Vanity is but the surface.

  Blaise Pascal

  Surface

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• The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.

  Blaise Pascal

  Ignorance, Causes, Consciousness

  Blaise Pascal (2010). “Thoughts, Letters & Minor Works”, p.47, Cosimo, Inc.

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• 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.

  Stephen Spender

  Ambition, Ambitious, World

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• It is much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Prayer, Odds, Praying

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2008). “Barcelona, Berlin, New York, 1928-1931”

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• To boast of a performance which I cannot beat is merely stupid vanity. And if I can beat it that means there is nothing special about it. What has passed is already finished with. What I find more interesting is what is still to come.

  Emil Zatopek

  Stupid, Mean, Interesting

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• Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies.

  Dejan Stojanovic

  Lying, Fighting, Silence

  "The Sun Watches the Sun". Book by Dejan Stojanovic, "Simplicity" (p. 131), 1999.

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• In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that's absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of Time to see what people and things really look like.

  Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  Running, Distance, Moving

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• We all of us must come to terms with what and who we are, and recognize that this wisdom is not going to earn us any praise, that life is not going to pin a medal on us for recognizing and enduring our own vanity or egoism or baldness or our potbelly.

  Sándor Márai

  Who We Are, Life Is, Praise

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• Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites our curiosity and it appears interesting. In fighting for his God everyone, in fact, fights only for the interest of his own vanity, which, of all the passions produced bye the mal-organization of society, is the quickest to take offense, and the most capable of committing the greatest follies.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Atheist, Passion, Eye

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Illustrated)”, p.1810, Delphi Classics

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• It was this feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant. Women knew that a land where men were contented, uncontradicted ans safe in possession of unpunctured vanity was likely to be a very pleasant place for women to live. So, from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration. In fact, men willingly gave ladies everything in the world except credit for having intelligence.

  Margaret Mitchell

  Men, Land, Southern

  Margaret Mitchell (2016). “Gone with the Wind”, p.99, Hamilton Books

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• Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, and there is nothing new under the sun, as Solomon said more than three thousand years ago.

  Paulo Coelho

  Years, Three, Sun

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• Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out - a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes - like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much.

  Saul Bellow

  Pain, Betrayal, Cutting

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• It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

  John le Carre

  Lonely, People, Assuming

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• Of course, true love is exceptional - two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.

  Albert Camus

  Love Is, Two, Boredom

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Fall”, p.57, Vintage

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• But women are very differently situated with respect to eachother - for they are all rivals (...) Is it then surprising that when the sole ambition of woman centres in beauty, and interest gives vanity additional force, perpetual rivalships should ensue? They are all running the same race, and would rise above the virtue of morals, if they did not view each other with a suspicious and even envious eye.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Running, Ambition, Eye

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• Despite my vanity, I fear for my sanity.

  Pseudonymous Bosch

  Sanity, Jester, Despite

  Pseudonymous Bosch (2012). “This Isn't What It Looks Like: The Secret Series”, p.87, Usborne Publishing Ltd

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• She died on a windy gray day in March when the sky was full of darting crows and the world lay prostrate and defeated after winter. Peter Lake was at her side and it ruined him forever. It broke him as he had not ever imagined he could have been broken. He would never again be young, or able to remember what it was like to be young. What he had once taken to be pleasures would appear to him in his defeat as hideous and deserved punishments for reckless vanity.

  Mark Helprin

  Taken, Winter, Lakes

  Mark Helprin (1989). “Winter's Tale”, Pocket Books

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• You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

  John Berger

  Mirrors, Hands, Naked

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