Vanity Quotes - Page 23

• In heaven I yearn for knowledge, account all else inanity; On earth I confess an itch for the praise of fools - that's vanity

  Robert Browning

  Heaven, Earth, Fool

  Robert Browning, David Ewbank (2007). “The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Volume XV, with Variant Readings and Annotations”, p.82, Ohio University Press

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• I scarce ever heard or saw the introductory words, "Without vanity I may say," etc., but some vain thing immediately followed.

  Benjamin Franklin

  May, Speech, Saws

  Benjamin Franklin (2006). “The Portable Benjamin Franklin”, p.11, Penguin

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• He [man] abuses equally other animals and his own species, the rest of whom live in famine, languish in misery, and work only to satisfy the immoderate appetite and the still more insatiable vanity of this human being who, destroying others by want, destroys himself by excess.

  Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

  Animal, Men, Abuse

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• Vanity should never tempt a player to engage in a combat at the risk of loss of health. It is bad enough to lose without the additional annoyance of paying doctors' bills.

  Emanuel Lasker

  Loss, Player, Doctors

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• The idea of Kanye and vanity are like, synonymous. But I've put myself in a lot of places where a vain person wouldn't put themselves in. Like what's vanity about wearing a kilt?

  Kanye West

  Ideas, Kilts, Egomaniacs

  "Will Kid Cudi's Coachella crop top start a new hip-hop fashion trend?" by Nadeska Alexis, www.mtv.com. April 14, 2014.

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• There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. That personal writing by women is no more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up.

  Lena Dunham

  Writing, Exercise, Appreciate

  Lena Dunham (2014). “Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"”, p.16, Random House

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• I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.

  David Remnick

  Mistake, Thinking, Office

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• You feel you are hedged in; you dream of escape; but beware of mirages. Do not run or fly away in order to get free: rather dig in the narrow place which has been given you; you will find God there and everything. God does not float on your horizon, he sleeps in your substance. Vanity runs, love digs. If you fly away from yourself, your prison will run with you and will close in because of the wind of your flight; if you go deep down into yourself it will disappear in paradise.

  Gustave Thibon

  Running, Dream, Sleep

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• I think what kind of destroyed the franchise, in some ways, was ego and vanity. When that element of ego and vanity that's sitting there in the franchise right now gets pushed aside, I think the whole thing could be re-tooled. I think it's the type of franchise that has years in it, and has lots of legs.

  Joe Flanigan

  Thinking, Years, Ego

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• 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.

  Richard Greenberg

  Mean, Thinking, People

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• Praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.

  John Berryman

  Self, Blame, Pity

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• Egocentricity: The vanity that makes you wonder what people are thinking about you when they are really wondering what you are thinking about them.

  Evan Esar

  Thinking About You, People, Wonder

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• Bodybuilding is men on a stage in their underwear wearing brown paint showing other men their muscles. It is training for appearance only, and at the contest level requires a degree of vanity, narcissism, and self-absorption that I find distasteful and odd

  Mark Rippetoe

  Bodybuilding, Men, Self

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• Where in this wide world can man find nobility without pride, friendship without envy, or beauty without vanity?

  Bantu Holomisa

  Horse, Pride, Men

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• Self restraint in speech, food, entertainment and vanity are the most essential fundamental of spiritual growth.

  Nouman Ali Khan

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Food

  FaceBook post by Nouman Ali Khan from Sep 26, 2013

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• 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.

  Bernard of Clairvaux

  Wish, Desire, May

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• Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Prayer, Odds

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

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• You will be most readily cured of vanity or presumption by studying the history of music, and by hearing the master pieces which have been produced at different periods.

  Robert Schumann

  Different, Pieces, Hearing

  Robert Schumann (1860). “Advice to Young Musicians”, p.20

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• If I have one vanity wish, it would be to direct. It's the only thing I haven't done yet that I would like to.

  Theodore Bikel

  Wish, Would Be, Done

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• To write well and speak well is mere vanity if one does not live well.

  Bridget of Sweden

  Writing, Doe, Speak

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• An Actor is an interpreter of other men's words, often a soul which wishes to reveal itself to the world but dare not, a craftsman, a bag of tricks, a vanity bag, a cool observer of mankind, a child and at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerize a group of innocents.

  Alec Guinness

  Children, Men, Two

  Alec Guinness (1986). “Blessings in Disguise”, New York : Knopf

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• To find love in Paris you must go down among those classes where the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle for bare necessities, have allowed more energy to survive.

  Stendhal

  Struggle, Class, Paris

  Stendhal (1957). “Love”, Merlin Pr

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• Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Running, Expression, Desire

  J. Robert Oppenheimer's letter to his brother Frank Oppenheimer (October 14, 1929), as quoted in "Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections" edited by Alice Kimball Smith (p. 136), 1995.

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• The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.

  Immanuel Kant

  Men, Numbers, Evil

  Immanuel Kant (1904). “The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant”

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• I hate the countrie's dirt and manners, yet I love the silence; I embrace the wit; A courtship, flowing here in full tide. But loathe the expense, the vanity and pride. No place each way is happy.

  William Habington

  Country, Hate, Pride

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