Famous Quotes & Sayings

Friedrich Nietzsche

The most vulnerable and yet most unconquerable of things is human vanity; nay, through being wounded its strength increases and can grow to giant proportions.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The strongest knowledge (that of the total freedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: for it always has the strongest opponent, human vanity.

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.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Whatever pretext we may give for our affections, often it is only interest and vanity which cause them.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

We speak little if not egged on by vanity.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

If vanity does not entirely overthrow the virtues, at least it makes them all totter.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

What is called liberality is often merely the vanity of giving.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

What renders other people's vanity insufferable is that it wounds our own.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

People are more slanderous from vanity than from malice.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Flattery is a base coin which is current only through our vanity.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

We say little, when vanity does not make us speak.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Virtue would go far if vanity did not keep it company.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Virtue would not make such advances if there were not a little vanity to keep it company.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

The judgments our enemies make about us come nearer to the truth than those we make about ourselves.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Penetration has an air of divination; it pleases our vanity more than any other quality of the mind.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Flattery is false money, which would not be current were it not for our vanity.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Clemency, which we make a virtue of, proceeds sometimes from vanity, sometimes from indolence, often from fear, and almost always from a mixture of all three.

Hugh Laurie

One thing House needs Wilson for is vanity. He needs someone to laugh at his jokes.

Horace Walpole

It is difficult to divest one's self of vanity; because impossible to divest one's self of self-love.

Jackie DeShannon

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

Jorge Luis Borges

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

Kenneth Clark

You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.

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.

Jonathan Swift

Vanity is a natural object of temptation to a woman.

Norman Mailer

If you can change style, why stick to one style? Style is a vanity because it gives you product identification.

Mason Cooley

Vanity well fed is benevolent. Vanity hungry is spiteful.

Theodore Parker

That which is called liberality is frequently nothing more than the vanity of giving.