Quotes About Vanity

The best ink for Vanity Fair use would be one that faded utterly in a couple of days, and left the paper clean and blank, so that you might write on it to somebody else.

Peace to thee, kind and selfish, vain and generous old heathen!—We shall see thee no more. Let us hope that Lady Jane supported her kindly, and led her with gentle hand out of the busy struggle of Vanity Fair.

Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?

And for my part I believe that remorse is the least active of all a man's moral senses—the very easiest to be deadened when wakened, and in some never wakened at all. We grieve at being found out and at the idea of shame or punishment, but the mere sense of wrong makes very few people unhappy in Vanity Fair.

Ah, my dear, when big and little men come to be measured rightly, and great and small actions to be weighed properly, and people to be stripped of their royal robes, beggars' rags, generals' uniforms, seedy out-at-elbowed coats, and the like—or the contrary say, when souls come to be stripped of their wicked deceiving bodies, and turned out stark naked as they were before they were born—what a strange startling sight shall we see, and what a pretty figure shall some of us cut!

If every person is to be banished from society who runs into debt and cannot pay—if we are to be peering into everybody's private life, speculating upon their income, and cutting them if we don't approve of their expenditure—why, what a howling wilderness and intolerable dwelling Vanity Fair would be!

To watch the behaviour of a fine lady to other and humbler women is a very good sport for a philosophical frequenter of Vanity Fair.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Morning is best when it begins with the last hours of night. ...Enough of culture's hours. I am a peasant. Enough of feasting. I want hunger. Enough of fat. I want muscle. Enough of pity. I want humor. Enough of vanity. I want pride.

Thine face is not worth sunburning.

Who knows himself a braggart, let him fear this, for it will come to pass that every braggart shall be found an ass.

We will all laugh at gilded butterflies.

He that is proud eats up himself: pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle.

Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust? And, live we how we can, yet die we must.

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad.

Truth may seem, but cannot be; Beauty brag, but 'tis not she: Truth and beauty buriéd be.

I'll read enough When I do see the very book indeed Where all my sins are writ, and that's myself. Give me that glass and therein will I read. No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath sorrow struck So many blows upon this face of mine And made no deeper wounds? O flattering glass, Like to my followers in prosperity Thou dost beguile me!

She smiled with so sweet a cheer That had Narcissus seen her as she stood Self-love had never drowned him in the flood

The quality of nothing hath not such need to hide itself

Kind sir, give me a good fortune. Fortuneteller: I don't make fortunes; I only see them. Charmian: Then see a good one for me. Fortuneteller: Your beauty will be even greater than it is now. Charmian (to the others) He means I'll get fat. Iras No, he means you'll use makeup when you're old. Fortuneteller: You will love more than you are loved. Charmian: I had rather heat my liver with drinking.

I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two and wear my dagger with the braver grace

We strut and fret our hour upon the stage and then are no more.

Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.

The devil a puritan that he is, or anything, constantly, but a time-pleaser, an affectioned ass that cons state without book and utters it by great swathes; the best persuaded of himself, so crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him – and on that vice in him will my revenge find notable cause to work.