Quotes About Vanity

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people - what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.

People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more then they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime.

Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness...

It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds

University lectures are an obsolete practice inherited from the Middle Ages when books were scarce. Students should read, not listen. To swallow instruction from a lectern is like sipping through a straw. Lectures pander to the vanity of the lecturer and stimulate conflict between academics.

Even Orlando (who had no conceit of her person) knew it, for she smiled the involuntary smile which women smile when their own beauty, which seems not their own, forms like a drop falling or a fountain rising and confronts them all of a sudden in the glass.

Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.

And why not enjoy [life] this very moment?' The thought struck him like a bullet. Ambition dropped like a plummet. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected love, and of vanity rebuked, and all the other stings and pricks which the nettle-bed of life had burnt upon him when ambitious of fame, but could no longer inflict upon one careless of glory, he opened his eyes…

Essa rua espalhafatosa, alvoroçada e vulgar lembra-nos que a vida é uma luta; que toda construção é perecível; que toda exibição é vaidade.

I am immensely respectable. All the young ladies in the office acknowledge my entrance. I can dine where I like now, and without vanity may suppose that I shall soon acquire a house in Surrey, two cars, a conservatory and some rare species of melon.

toda a pompa é construída sobre a corrupção; como o esqueleto jaz por baixo da carne; como nós, que dançamos e cantamos na superfície, ficaremos embaixo; como o veludo púrpura se transforma em pó; como o anel (aqui Orlando, inclinando sua lanterna, apanharia um anel de ouro faltando uma pedra que rolara para um canto) perdia seu rubi e como o olho, que fora tão radiante, deixara de brilhar.

La gente que se afeita se rejuvenece un día todas las mañanas.

I wonder if during the course of these tragic notes, I have sufficiently stressed the sending quality of my striking, if perhaps somewhat brutal good looks". (Humbert in Lolita)

Let the rabbit of free enterprise out of its velveteen bag and too many people would have to be fired, too much idiocy exposed to the light of judgment or ridicule, too much vanity sacrificed to the fires of efficiency. Such a catastrophe obviously would threaten the American way of life, to say nothing of the belief in free markets.

Dr. Wintermute beheld Mrs. Pinchbeck befeathered, beribboned, crinolined, corseted, frizzled, and festooned, though not wasted.

Who looks at a woman's elbows, you sick fuck?" "I'm just saying it's the one place that a woman can't hide her age. My wife told me. She lemons hers sometimes. Cuts a lemon in half, hollows it out, fills it with olive oil and kosher salt and sits at her vanity, arms up like a little bunny." Lenhardt demonstrated the pose. "I tell you, Kevin, it's like going to bed with a fucking tossed salad.

The point of life is not to be a young girl forever, unless you're particularly vapid and stupid... There ain't nothing happening on a roll of white paper

No one in Cattaraugus had much idea of what an artist' colony might be. "Art" itself was viewed with suspicion, scorn. There was the sense, as people like my mother conveyed it, of a fraud, a hustle. "Art" was putting something over on someone, the way politicians did. "Art" was a sorry excuse for not being productive, useful. "Art" was vanity, pretension.

Ultimately, the mirror reflects our mortality; when we gaze in the mirror, we gaze at a skeleton.

Humility is the embarrassment you feel when you tell people how wonderful you are.

Als wij geen namen zouden hebben, zou alles veel duidelijker zijn. Gewoon wat vluchtige materie met een beetje bewustzijn, verschijningen die komen en tamelijk snel weer verdwijnen. Door die namen denken we dat we heel wat zijn, we denken misschien zelfs dat ze ons beschermen, maar wie weet nog de namen van alle miljarden die verdwenen zijn?

Like a child, she would not see beyond the demolished walls of her soap bubble which had encased her in its iridescence, promising scarves of brilliant colours, perfume, fine stockings, cosmetics, bracelets, rich warm cardigans, petticoats with frills and inset lace. Tablets of soap, bed socks and two handkerchiefs were weapons piercing her with old age.

Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity, and their love to feed their pride.