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Who seems most hideous when adorned the most. (Ludovico Ariosto)
Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man's vanity to be loathsome. (Hans Jean Arp)
Pride is a wound, and vanity is the scab on it. One's life picks at the scab to open the wound again and again. In men, it seldom heals and often grows septic. (Michael Ayrton)
I should have been, I don't know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance. (Francis Bacon)
The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity. (Henri Bergson)
Vain are the thousand creeds that move men's hearts, unutterably vain, worthless as wither'd weeds. (Emily Bronte)
Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find it everywhere. (Van Wyck Brooks)
There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
Vanity, indeed, is the very antidote to conceit; for while the former makes us all nerve to the opinion of others, the latter is perfectly satisfied with its opinion of itself. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance. (Samuel Butler, novelist)
-Journey to the End of the Night...
There's no such thing as intelligent vanity. It's an instinct. And you'll never find a man who is not first and foremost vain. (Louis-Ferdinand Celine)
The knowledge of yourself will preserve you from vanity. (Miguel de Cervantes)
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory. (Joseph Conrad)
The joke I always make about myself is that I'm self-involved, but I'm not vain. (Lena Dunham)
We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don't care for. (Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach)
Where would the power of women be, were it not for the vanity of men? (Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach)
Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return. (George Eliot)
I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity. (Gustave Flaubert)
Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they have of it themselves; but I give it fair quarter, wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the possessor, and to others who are within his sphere of action: and therefore, in many cases, it would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity among the other comforts of life. (Benjamin Franklin)
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If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men? (Vincent van Gogh)
Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency. (Franz Kafka)
If there is a single quality that is shared by all great men, it is vanity. But I mean by 'vanity' only that they appreciate their own worth. Without this kind of vanity they would not be great. And with vanity alone, of course, a man is nothing. (Yousef Karsh)
'Vanity of vanities... all is vanity.' You kill yourself to get to the grave. Especially you kill yourself to get to the grave before you die; and the name of the grave is 'success,' the name of that grave is hullabullo boom boom horseshit. (Jack Kerouac)
A man's vanity tells him what is honor, a man's conscience what is justice. (Walter Savage Landor)
Throughout the centuries, man has considered himself beautiful. I rather suppose that man only believes in his own beauty out of pride; that he is not really beautiful and he suspects this himself; for why does he look on the face of his fellow-man with such scorn? (Compte de Lautreamont)
-The Story Girl...
It's not vanity to know your own good points. It would just be stupidity if you didn't; It's only vanity when you get puffed up about them. (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
How vain is painting, which is admired for reproducing the likeness of things whose originals are not admired. (Blaise Pascal)
Those who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also. (Blaise Pascal)
To be a man's own fool is bad enough, but the vain man is everybody's. (William Penn)
Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul. (Fernando Pessoa)
Take away a painter's vanity, said a famous landscape painter, and he will never touch a pencil again. (Walter J. Phillips)
If you are vain it is vain to sign your pictures and vain not to sign them. If you are not vain it is not vain to sign them and not vain not to sign them. (Fairfield Porter)
A golden bit does not make the horse any better. (Latin proverb)
-Peg Woffington (1853)
In players, vanity cripples art at every step. (Charles Reade)
How can anybody learn anything from an artwork when the piece of art only reflects the vanity of the artist and not reality? (Lou Reed)
The common practice of keeping up appearances with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain. (John Ruskin)
Vanity is arrogance with a mirror. (Ian Semple)
Vanity is the pride of false accomplishment. (Ian Semple)
The Lord who cannot endure vain repetitions is equally weary of vain variations. (Charles Haddon Spurgeon)
Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Oh, Vanity of Vanities! / How wayward the decrees of Fate are; / How very weak the very wise, / How very small the very great are! (William Makepeace Thackeray)
Cure yourself of the affliction of caring how you appear to others. Concern yourself only with how you appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have of you. (Miguel de Unamuno)
Why seek to embarrass [the artist] with vanities foreign to his quietness? Know you not that certain sciences require the whole man, leaving no part of him at leisure for your trifles? (Leonardo da Vinci)
It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed 'Wisdom.' And then I know exactly what is going to follow: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.' (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
The surest cure for vanity is loneliness. (Tom Wolfe)
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