Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Stuart Mill

When a thing is bought not for its use but for its costliness, cheapness is no recommendation. As Sismondi remarks, the consequence of cheapening articles of vanity, is not that less is expended on such things, but that the buyers substitute for the cheapened article some other which is more costly, or a more elaborate quality of the same thing; and as the inferior quality answered the purpose of vanity equally well when it was equally expensive, a tax on the article is really paid by nobody: it is a creation of public revenue by which nobody loses.

Thomas a Kempis

All is vanity but to love God and serve Him.

Matthew Macfadyen

My vanity is I'm terribly romantic! But being married is lovely.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

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.

Louisa May Alcott

Rome took all the vanity out of me; for after seeing the wonders there, I felt too insignificant to live, and gave up all my foolish hopes in despair.

Paulo Coelho

The alchemists spent years in their laboratories, observing the fire that purified the metals. They spent so much time close to the fire that gradually they gave up the vanities of the world. They discovered that the purification of the metals had led to a purification of themselves.

Moss Hart

Without vanity a writer's work is tepid, and he must accept his vanity as part of his stock in trade and live with it as one of the hazards of his profession.

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.

John Doerr

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

Lewis B. Smedes

Because arrogance is born in personal vanity, arrogant people are driven without mercy. They can never get enough power to fill the soul's needs or enough respect to overcome the fear that they deserve less than they are getting.

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.

Gustav Mahler

You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion.

Gustave Flaubert

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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity.

John Lancaster Spalding

The doctrine of the utter vanity of life is a doctrine of despair, and life is hope.

Logan Pearsall Smith

One's own vanities and humiliations I find a delicious subject for conversation. Things said of me behind my back I don't enjoy, and don't listen to them.

T. S. Eliot

The majority of mankind is lazyminded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.

Richard Avedon

My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read.

Richard Baxter

The churchyard is the market place where all things are rated at their true value, and those who are approaching it talk of the world and its vanities with a wisdom unknown before.

Victor Hugo

Stupidity talks, vanity acts.

Thomas More

No living creature is naturally greedy, except from fear of want - or in the case of human beings, from vanity, the notion that you're better than people if you can display more superfluous property than they can.

Thomas Paine

It was needless, after this, to say that all was vanity and vexation of spirit; for it is impossible to derive happiness from the company of those whom we deprive of happiness.

Thomas Paine

Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.

Storm Jameson

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.

Samuel Johnson

With what hope can we endeavor to persuade the ladies that the time spent at the toilet is lost in vanity.

Samuel Johnson

Falsehoods of convenience or vanity, falsehoods from which no evil immediately visible ensues, except the general degradation of human testimony, are very lightly uttered, and once uttered are sullenly supported.

Samuel Johnson

There are few so free from vanity as not to dictate to those who will hear their instructions with a visible sense of their own beneficence.

Sophie Swetchine

Our vanity is the constant enemy of our dignity.

Stendhal

Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.

Ramakrishna

The vanities of all others may gradually die out, but the vanity of a saint regarding his sainthood is hard indeed to wear away.

Rafe Spall

Theres nothing so unattractive as vanity... particularly male vanity.

Stephen Young

Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety.