Quotes About Vanity

Owen liked me," Waldegrave told Strike. "Oh yeah. I knew how to handle him. Stoke that man's vanity and you could get him to do anything you wanted. Half an hour's praise before you asked him to change anything in a manuscript. 'Nother half hour's praise before you asked him to make another change. Only way.

In old magazines and newspapers we find a number of uncomfortably revealing things: the aged as young, the dead as living, forgotten people as celebrities, an array of our own barbarous and long-discarded fads and postures, and worst, visible only in this removed perspective, our own sickening pretensions to meaning and permanence.

The ultimate philosophical truth is this: Without Christ, all is vanity even when it's easy; with Him, all is well even when it's hard.

Cornerstone No. 4 is the Ice-Ball Theory, which states: Given the apparent, ultimate fate of the earth, it is vain and nonsensical to take oneself too seriously.

The reality from my vantage point was that 50 billion years from now, when the earth is nothing but an ice ball, my problems of today will be too insignificant to have been recorded. Indeed, there would undoubtedly not even be a record of the entire century in which I had lived most of my life.

Donald Trump was building a pyramid in the Nevada desert to house his eventual remains. When done, it will be ten meters taller than the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

George Stout saw through their acts. "I am sick of all schemers," he wrote, "of all the vain crawling toads who now edge into positions of advantage and look for selfish gain or selfish glory from all this suffering."13

The Clown turned his powdered face to the mirror. If to be fair is to be beautiful, he said, who can compare with me in my white mask? Who can compare with him in his white mask? I asked Death beside me. Who can compare with me? said Death, for I am paler still. You are very beautiful, sighed the Clown, turning his powdered face from the mirror.

I act uncommonly important when I read, look all around to see if people are noticing how cleverly someone there is improving his mind and wits; I slit open page after page at splendid leisure, do not even read any more but satisfy myself with having assumed the posture of a person immersed in a book. That is how I am: harebrained, and all for effect. I am vain, but my satisfaction with my vanity costs remarkably little.

And the secret is, I lowered my voice, as at a poetry reading, he was right! It is vanity, it is pride! It is the hubris of rationalism to always attack the prophet, the mystic, the god. It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us.

She had very lovely hair. Blue eyes, too, and tons of vanity to keep everything in her favorite perspective. At times she seemed to behave quite stupidly, but then at other times I have wondered.

Mr. Adams is vain, suspicious, and stubborn, of an excessive self-regard, taking counsel with nobody."9 Jefferson predicted to Létombe that Adams would last only one term and urged the French to invade England.

6 He also saw his father's vanity, noting how after one good deed he was "simply too pleased with himself.

An image comes to Russell: we drift through the world like dandelion puffs on the wind, we spread our seed and disappear, and the world doesn't care. The world doesn't even notice. The world is not about us. Finally

Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain - at least in a poor country like Russia - and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.

If the painter has clumsy hands, he will be apt to introduce them into his works, and so of any other part of his person, which may not happen to be so beautiful as it ought to be. He must, therefore, guard particularly against that self-love, or too good opinion of his own person, and study by every means to acquire the knowledge of what is most beautiful, and of his own defects, that he may adopt the one and avoid the other.

Nothing should be so greatly feared as empty fame.

Life and Death The living are but passers-by, And those are going home who die. The sky and earth are hotels just For all to grieve over age-old dust. The Moon Goddess lives long in vain; The sacred tree's cut down with pain. The bleached bones can nor speak nor sing. Could green pines feel the warmth of spring? Ancestors and posterity, Don't prize but sigh for vanity.

Oh, honey, of course it hurts! Beauty is pain. But you don't want to look like a troll, do you?

Oh, why should it bother her? But it did. It wasn't so much that Evie wanted Jericho as she wanted him to keep wanting her. It was utterly selfish, she knew. More about her vanity than anything else.

Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.

The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.

I cannot agree that mountain climbing is merely one manifestation of man's spiritual aspirations. I think instead it is a hysterical paroxysm of his infantile vanity.