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.
Man that is of woman born is apt to be as vain has his mother.
You think you can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. . . . . We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority.
To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.
For me the motley and the bauble, yea, Though all be vanity, as the Preacher saith, The mirth of love be mine for one brief breath!
What if the man could see Beauty Itself, pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality, and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine,. . . the man becoming in that communion, the friend of God,. . . ?
Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.
The unforgivable political sin is vanity, the killer diet is sour grapes.
So willing is every man to flatter himself, that the difference between approving laws, and obeying them, is frequently forgotten; he that acknowledges the obligations of morality and pleases his vanity with enforcing them to others, concludes himself zealous in the cause of virtue.
He who wants to educate himself in Chess must evade what is dead in Chess. . . the habit of playing with inferior opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief, everything that leas to standstill or to anarchy.
Oh God, God, please come to me, please illumine me, please act in me and through me. I don't know what's right and what's wrong. I can't tell anymore. I could be doing what I feel is right and perhaps I'm deceiving myself. Perhaps it's all my ego and my vanity. Please show me what's right or don't even show me. Please just do it, whether it brings me happiness or unhappiness, riches or poverty, sorrow or joy. Please act in and through me. I love only you.
I was amongst the virtues like the great Turk in his seraglio of women, and I chose to dwell with that virtue which looked the fairest in my eyes and gave me at that season most pleasure. In short, I made wives of them: I first admired them, then made them my own property, and if they would not submit to my will, I again turned them off and divorced them.
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.
As long as somebody is guaranteed a certain number of sales you know you're gonna keep seeing these vanity projects. I mean they have a place, they serve a function they can bring people into comics.
Pride works _from within_; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.
The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.
When men will not be reasoned out of a vanity, they must be ridiculed out of it.
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.
Vanity is so superficial. It doesn't provide the grounds for progress.