Famous Quotes & Sayings

David Steel

All politicians have vanity. Some wear it more gently than others.

Alfred de Musset

Vanity and dignity are incompatible with each other; vain women are almost sure to be vulnerable.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

Bette Davis

I guess I'm larger than life. That's my problem.

Bill Vaughan

Aristocracy has three successive ages. First superiority s, then privileges and finally vanities. Having passed from the first, it degenerates in the second and dies in the third.

Bertrand Russell

Vanity is a motive of immense potency.

Bertrand Russell

One of the troubles about vanity is that it grows with what it feeds on. The more you are talked about, the more you will wish to be talked about.

Bertrand Russell

I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.

Bertrand Russell

What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it's easy to have glory without power.

John Doerr

Well, there are more writers of blogs right now than there are readers, so that's clearly a vanity phenomenon.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.

Garrison Keillor

Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.

Francois Fenelon

If we were faultless, we should not be so much annoyed by the defects of those with whom we associate. If we were to acknowledge honestly that we have not virtue enough to bear patiently with our neighbor's weaknesses, we should show our own imperfection, and this alarms our vanity.

Jorge Luis Borges

To bless thine enemy is a good way to satisfy thy vanity.

Jonathan Swift

Vanity is a natural object of temptation to a woman.

Lord Byron

The French courage proceeds from vanity

Lord Byron

Ecclesiastes said that "all is vanity," Most modern preachers say the same, or show it By their examples of true Christianity: In short, all know, or very short may know it.

Emile M. Cioran

I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority.

Henry Ward Beecher

There is nothing which vanity does not desecrate.

Henry Fielding

O vanity, how little is thy force acknowledged or thy operations discerned! How wantonly dost thou deceive mankind under different disguises! Sometimes thou dost wear the face of pity; sometimes of generosity; nay, thou hast the assurance to put on those glorious ornaments which belong only to heroic virtue.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

Vanity and rudeness are seldom seen together.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Ill-humor is nothing more than an inward feeling of our own want of merit, a dissatisfaction with ourselves which is always united with an envy that foolish vanity excites.

Jim Morrison

Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. Jealousy we understood and thought natural--a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange, new feeling for us.

Anna Jameson

Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty.

Florence King

The joker in the deck of lesbian fidelity is female vanity: no woman of fifty is going to undress in front of a woman of twenty no matter how much she might lust for her.

Florence Nightingale

By mortifying vanity we do ourselves no good. It is the want of interest in our life which produces it; by filling up that want of interest in our life we can alone remedy it.

Flannery O'Connor

I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.

Fernando Torres

Purpose without virtue is vanity.

Helen Keller

Let pessimism once take hold of the mind, and life is all topsy-turvy, all vanity and vexation of spirit. There is no cure for individual or social disorder, except in forgetfulness and annihilation.

George Eliot

Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs from another.

Jackie DeShannon

The happy story right now is the full page in Vanity Fair, which gives me a great deal of exposure.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

That which makes the vanity of others unbearable to us is that which wounds our own.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Generosity is the vanity of giving.