Vanity Quotes

Vanity makes us do more things against inclination than reason.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Cowardice asks the question - Is it safe? Expediency asks the question - Is it politic? Vanity asks the question - Is it popular? But conscience asks the question - Is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is better in some respects to be admired by those with whom you live, than to be loved by them. And this is not on account of any gratification of vanity, but because admiration is so much more tolerant than love.

Sir Arthur Helps

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

Logan Pearsall Smith

I have always found that angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.

William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell

To act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite beings. Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive.

James Boswell

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

Charles Caleb Colton

Offended vanity is the great separator in social life.

Arthur Helps

The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bustling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

Dale Carnegie

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

T. E. Lawrence

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.

T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

T. E. Lawrence

If one has no vanity in this life of ours, there is no sufficient reason for living.

Leo Tolstoy

The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead.

Sir George Savile

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.

Helen Hunt Jackson

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

Lawrence of Arabia, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Suppressed introductory chapter, first published 1939, Penguin edition p. 23

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.

Samuel Johnson

Those who live on vanity must, not unreasonably, expect to die of mortification.

Alice Thomas Ellis

Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Discourtesy does not spring merely from one bad quality, but from several - - From foolish vanity, from ignorance of what is due to others, from indolence, from stupidity, from distraction of thought, from contempt of others, from jealousy.

Jean de la Bruyere

It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption, too, after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth, to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to all.

Heinrich Heine

Vanity is the quicksand of reason.

George Sands