Quotations about 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


Beauty's sister is vanity, and its daughter lust. ~Author Unknown


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


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


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


Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they have of it themselves; but I give it fair quarter, wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the possessor, and to others who are within his sphere of action: and therefore, in many cases, it would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity among the other comforts of life. ~Benjamin Franklin