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Vanity is excessive pride in your appearance or achievements

• Vanity: Excessive pride in or admiration of one’s own appearance or achievements. Oxford Dictionary
• Vanity: Excessive pride in one’s appearance, qualities, abilities, achievements. Dictionary.com
• Vanity: The quality of people who have too much pride in their own appearance, abilities, achievements, etc. : the quality of being vain. Merriam Webster
• Pride,  Arrogance, Transcending the ego, Humility,  Modesty

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Vanity is the favourite vice of many

• Vanity is my favorite sin. Al Pacino (Devil’s Advocate)
• Vanity, I am sensible, is my cardinal vice and cardinal folly; and I am in continual danger, when in company, of being led an ignis fatuus chase by it. John Adams
• Vanity is the most despotic and iniquitous of masters, and I can never be the slave of my own vices. George Sand
• Vice

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Vanity comes in different grades – or does it?

• The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone’s life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession. Iris Murdoch
• There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it. Mark Twain

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We’re all vain to some degree

• Vanity is easily forgiven, for we are all vain, and even as we laugh at the weakness of others we feel that their vanity has touched the responding chord of our own. Arthur Lynch

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Vanity loves to feel important and indispensable

• Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy and vain. To be a warrior one needs to be light and fluid. Carlos Castaneda
• The highest form of vanity is love of fame. George Santayana
• There is no limit to the vanity of this world, each spoke in the wheel thinks the whole strength of the wheel depends upon it. H. W. Shaw

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Vanity loves to outdo others

• Cast out pride and vanity; have no thought of trying to rule over others or of outdoing them. Wallace D. Wattles

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Vanity preens itself on flattery and praise

• Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency. Francois de La Rochefoucauld
• In heaven I yearn for knowledge, account all else inanity; On earth I confess an itch for the praise of fools – that’s vanity. Robert Browning
• Vanity is the flatterer of the soul. Edward Counsel

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Vanity loves to talk – especially about itself

• We speak little if not egged on by vanity. François de la Rochefoucauld
• Vanity has many outlets in conversation, but great I is the front door. John Thornton

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Vanity believes it is the centre of the world

• Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe. But he must give up this vain pretense, this petty provincial way of thinking and judging. Ernst Cassirer

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Vanity is notoriously ingrateful

• The general cry is against ingratitude, but the complaint is misplaced, it should be against vanity; none but direct villains are capable of wilful ingratitude; but almost everybody is capable of thinking he hath done more than another deserves, while the other thinks he hath received less than he deserves. Alexander Pope
• Ingratitude

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Vanity cares deeply what others think …

• We are so vain that we care even for the opinion of those we don’t care for. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
• Vanity is the result of a delusion that someone is paying attention. Paul E. Sweeney
• Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return. George Eliot
• A simple race! they waste their toil For the vain tribute of a smile. Sir Walter Scott
• Vanity is apt to inspire contempt, but that becomes immediately tempered by a gentler and more gracious feeling; for the vain man desires to win our approbation, and in this way he flatters us. Arthur Lynch
• Approval seeking

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… hating indifference more than anything

• Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return. George Eliot
• Vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness. Edith Wharton

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Vanity is very difficult to kill …

• Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded. Friedrich Nietzsche
• Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man. Robert Louis Stevenson

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… but is easily wounded

• Vanity is very difficult to kill but is easily wounded. Anthony Lambert
• There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth. Edward G. Bulwer- Lytton
• Alas for human nature, that the wounds of vanity should smart and bleed so much longer than the wounds of affection! Thomas Babington Macaulay

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Vanity desires the esteem of others…

• Vanity is a desire of personal glory, the wish to be appreciated, honoured, and run after, not because of one’s personal qualities, merits, and achievements, but because of one’s individual existence. At best, therefore, it is a frivolous beauty whim it befits. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Vanity is so secure in the heart of man that everyone wants to be admired: even I who write this, and you who read this. Blaise Pascal
• Vanity does not refer to the opinion a man entertains of himself, but to that which he wishes others to entertain of him. William Hazlitt

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… while pride makes us esteem ourselves

• Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
• To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people. A conceited man is satisfied with the effect he produces on himself. Max Beerbohm
• Self-esteem

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Pride, some argue, has more redeeming qualities than vanity

• Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride – where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation. Jane Austen
• Vanity’s a confounded donkey, very apt to put his head between his legs and chuck us over; but Pride’s a fine horse, who will carry us over the ground, and enable us to distance our fellow travellers…. How often have you read of people rising from nothing, and becoming great men? This was from talent, sure enough; but it was talent with pride to force it onward, not talent with vanity to check it. Frederick Marryat
• Pride

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Pride is what we have.  Vanity is what others have.

• We have no patience with other people’s vanity because it is offensive to our own. Francois De La Rochefoucauld
• Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty. Louis Kronenberger

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More thoughts on pride verse vanity

• Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay. François de la Rochefoucauld
• The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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Vanity comes at a price

• Those who live on vanity must, not unreasonably, expect to die of mortification. Anne Ellis
• An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self- absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them. Pope Francis I
• There is nothing which vanity does not desecrate. Henry Ward Beecher
• He that hath nothing to feed on but vanity and lies must needs lie down in the bed of sorrow. Anne Bradstreet
• 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

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Vanity can can make a person stupid, ignorant and even ridiculous

• Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity. Eric Hoffer
• The truest characters of ignorance are vanity, and pride and arrogance. Samuel Butler
• Our vanity is the constant enemy of our dignity. Madame Swetchine
• Vanity makes people ridiculous, pride odious, and ambition terrible. Sir Richard Steele
• Stupidity,  Ignorance,  Foolishness

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Vanity can cloud reason, memory and judgement

• Vanity is the quicksand of reason. George Sand
• Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory. Joseph Conrad
• In their vanity men focus on what they wish to hear and miss the hidden meaning, the lurking threat. David Hewson
• Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. Joseph Conrad
• Reason,  Memory,  Common sense

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Vanity can make a person most unpopular

• It may easily come to pass that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance. Baruch Spinoza
• A vain man is a nauseous creature: he is so full of himself that he has no room for anything else, be it never so good or deserving. William Penn
• Pride that dines on vanity, sups on contempt. Benjamin Franklin

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Vanity can get in the way of love and connection

• Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see …each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition– all such distortions within our own egos– condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other’s naked hearts.  Tennessee Williams
• Love is that enviable state that knows no envy or vanity, only empathy and a longing to be greater than oneself. Thomas More
• Love,  Connection

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Vanity can get in the way of learning

• Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all. Thomas Szasz
• Learning

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Vanity can easily degenerate into the insulting behaviour of arrogance

• Arrogance: An insulting way of thinking or behaving that comes from believing that you are better, smarter, or more important than other people. Merriam Webster
• 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. Lewis B. Smedes
• Arrogance

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Ensure that your self-love does not become vanity

• We need to watch that such healthy recognition does not slide into vanity, excessive pride and an inflated sense of importance, which reflect back to us a distorted image of ourselves and do nothing to promote flourishing. Antonia Macaro and Julian Baggini
• Vanity finds in self-love so powerful an ally, that it storms, as it were by a coup de main, the citadel of our heads, where, having blinded the two watchmen, it readily descends into the heart. Charles Caleb Colton

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Transcend vanity …

• You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion. Gustav Mahler
• 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
• The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity. Thomas Carlyle
• 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

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… through laughing at its sillinesses

• The basis of tragedy is man’s helplessness against disease, war and death; the basis of comedy is man’s helplessness against vanity (the vanity of love, greed, lust, power). Dawn Powell
• The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that’s laughable is vanity. Henri Bergson
• When men will not be reasoned out of a vanity, they must be ridiculed out of it. L’Estrange

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…  through self-knowledge

• A knowledge of thyself will preserve thee from vanity. Miguel de Cervantes
• Self-knowledge

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… through humility

• It is vain to gather virtues without humility, for the spirit of God delighteth to dwell in the hearts of the humble. Erasmus
• Humility

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… through a willingness to serve God

• A useful approach is to let the love for God replace the wilfulness that is driving the seeking. One can release all desire to seek and realize that the thought that there is anything else but God is a baseless vanity… Out of an unrestricted love for God arises the willingness to surrender all motives except to serve God completely. To be the servant of God becomes one’s goal rather than enlightenment. To be a perfect channel for God’s love is to surrender completely and to eliminate the goal seeking of spiritual ego. Joy itself becomes the initiator of further spiritual work. David R. Hawkins
• God

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Loneliness can cure vanity

• The surest cure for vanity is loneliness. Thomas Wolfe
• Loneliness

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Some argue that vanity has a redeeming side …

• 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
• There is nothing can pay one for that invaluable ignorance which is the companion of youth, those sanguine groundless hopes, and that lively vanity which makes all the happiness of life. Mary Worley Montagu
• I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity. Diana Vreeland
• Vanity is the healthiest thing in life. Karl Lagerfeld
• To this principle of vanity, which philosophers call a mean one, and which I do not, I owe a great part of the figure which I have made in life. Lord Chesterfield

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… for vanity can be a catalyst to action, and even great accomplishments

• What people regard as vanity—leaving great works, having children, acting in such a way as to prevent one’s name from being forgotten—I regard as the highest expression of human dignity. Paulo Coelho
• Without this ridiculous vanity that takes the form of self-display, and is part of everything and everyone, we would see nothing, and nothing would exist. Antonio Porchia
• Stupidity talks, vanity acts. Victor Hugo
• Achievement

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Some argue that even virtue often has vanity to thank for it

• Virtue would not go to such lengths if vanity did not keep her company.  François de la Rochefoucauld
• What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given. Francois de La Rochefoucauld
• 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
• If vanity does not overthrow all our virtues, at least she makes them totter.  François de la Rochefoucauld
• A man’s vanity tells him what is honor, a man’s conscience what is justice. Walter Savage Landor
• Virtue

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Keep vanity in mind when dealing with people

• When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity. Dale Carnegie

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Do not feed the vanity of others

• If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them. F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Vanity may be nought but insecurity

• A man’s vanity is more fragile that you might think. It’s easy for us to mistake shyness for coldness, and silence for indifference. Lisa Kleypas
• Vanity can apply to both insecurity and egotism. Taylor Swift
• Every man has just as much vanity as he wants understanding. Alexander Pope
• He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him. Gustave Flaubert
• A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments. Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Modesty is often vanity in disguise

• The inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self-deprecation. Edith Wharton
• Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it make us vain, in fact, of our modesty. Louis Kronenberger
• I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not. Lionel Shriver
• A vain man finds it wise to speak good or ill of himself; a modest man does not talk of himself. Jean De La Bruyere
• Modesty

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Here are some suggested forms of vanity

• It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. Mark Twain
• Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it. Blaise Pascal
• How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. Henry David Thoreau
• My vanity is not remotely physical, it is cerebral. I suppose feeling self-conscious might be a form of vanity, though. Richard Griffiths

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Fear of aging is vanity – or is it?

• When you’re 50 you start thinking about things you haven’t thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity – but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. Eugene O’Neill
• Any fear of aging, I think, is simply vanity. Leighton Meester
• Getting older gracefully

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Thoughts on women and vanity

• Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman. Friedrich Nietzsche
• Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty. Victor Hugo
• Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity, and their love to feed their pride. Charles Caleb Colton
• The woman who appeals to a man’s vanity may stimulate him, the woman who appeals to his heart may attract him, but it is the woman who appeals to his imagination who gets him. Helen Rowland
• Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I’m not ready for that yet. Margaret Atwood

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Thoughts on vanity and lust

• Do not follow vain desires; for verily he who prospers is preserved from lust, greed and anger. Tammy Faye Bakker
• Beauty’s sister is vanity, and its daughter lust. Proverb
• Vanity, revenge, loneliness, boredom, all apply: lust is one of the least of the reasons for promiscuity. Mignon McLaughlin
• The worst of lusts is vanity. Kedar Joshi
• Lust

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Thoughts on vanity and writing

• Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast. Logan Pearsall Smith
• There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly. Michel de Montaigne
• Writing

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• Vanity is having an orgasm and shouting your own name.
• Vanity is often so excessive, that those who are compelled to walk on crutches would fain make us believe they are raised on stilts. Eliza Cook
• Pride is what we have. Vanity is what others have.
• There are no grades of vanity; there are only grades of ability in concealing it.  Mark Twain
• Marriage is the operation by which a woman’s vanity and a man’s egotism are extracted without an anaesthetic.  Helen Rowland
• Be careful of men who are bald and rich; the arrogance of “rich” usually cancels out the nice of “bald.   Rita Rudner
• Confidence is a nice suit. Arrogance is the same suit with suspenders, Italian loafers, and gold cuff links. Tim Schneider
• Once we were whining losers but now we’re arrogant winners.  Chuck Burr
• Stupidity combined with arrogance and a huge ego will get you a long way. Chris Lowe
• There are two essential rules of management: One: the customer is always right. Two: they must be punished for their arrogance. Scott Adams
• To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood. George Santayana
• You’re so damn arrogant. If you ever met God, the first thing you’d say is what are you doing in my chair? Lisa Gardner
• A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.  Christopher Morley
• You’re so vain you probably think this song is about you.  Carly Simon
• And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence. Bertrand Russell
• A man that is deeply in love with himself will probably succeed in his suit owing to a lack of rivals. Austin O’Malley

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