1.
Never underestimate a man who overestimates himself.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
'Do not belittle an individual who is too confident in themselves.'
2.
Let us, therefore, foresake the vanity of the crowd and their false teachings, and turn back to the word delivered to us from the beginning.
Polycarp
Let us, thusly, abandon the conceit of the multitude and their deceptive maxims, and rediscover the instruction provided to us from the outset.
3.
Serenity, regularity, absence of vanity,Sincerity, simplicity, veracity, equanimity, Fixity, non-irritability, adaptability, Humility, tenacity, integrity, nobility, magnanimity, charity, generosity, purity. Practise daily these eighteen "ities" You will soon attain immortality.
Socrates
4.
There are those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge; that is curiosity. There are those who seek knowledge to be known by others; that is vanity. There are those who seek knowledge in order to serve; that is Love.
Bernard of Clairvaux
5.
Do not confuse understanding with a larger vocabulary, sacred writings are beneficial in stimulating desire for inward realization, if one stanza at a time is slowly assimilated. Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge.
Sri Yukteswar Giri
6.
All religions, all this singing, one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity. The sun’s light looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall, and a lot different on this other one, but it’s still one light.
Rumi
7.
Vanity: my favorite sin.
Al Pacino
Egotism: my preferred transgression.
8.
When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, exploring and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called “licking the earth.
Malcolm Muggeridge
9.
The much-vaunted sex appeal of American women is drawn from films, reviews and pin-ups, and is in large print fictitious. A recent medical survey in the United States showed that 75% of young American women are without strong sexual feeling and instead of satisfying their libido they seek pleasure narcissistically in exhibitionism, vanity, and the cult of fitness and health in a sterile sense.
Julius Evola
11.
To write well and speak well is mere vanity if one does not live well.
Bridget of Sweden
12.
Today, America poses a threat to peace and security in the world. Therefore, the slogan "Death to America" is no longer used only by our people. Today, you see throughout the world people setting fire to the effigy of the American president and chanting the slogan "Death to America." This is because of the American regime's exaggerated demands, its arrogance, its vanity, and its desire to control, and because it is a pawn in the hands of the Zionists.
Ali Khamenei
13.
Do not use your energy except for a cause more noble than yourself. Such a cause cannot be found except in Almighty God Himself: to preach the truth, to defend womanhood, to repel humiliation which your Creator has not imposed upon you, to help the oppressed. Anyone who uses his energy for the sake of the vanities of the world is like someone who exchanges gemstones for gravel. There is no nobility in anyone who lacks faith. The wise man knows that the only fitting price for his soul is a place in Paradise.
Ibn Hazm
14.
The whole business is built on ego, vanity, self-satisfaction, and it's total crap to pretend it's not.
George Michael
15.
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
16.
The deeper I go in considering the vanities of popular reasoning, the lighter and more foolish I find them. What greater stupidity can be imagined than that of calling jewels, silver, and gold "precious," and earth and soil "base"?
Galileo Galilei
17.
Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.
Garrison Keillor
18.
Whenever vanity and gaiety, a love of pomp and dress, furniture, equipage, buildings, great company, expensive diversions, and elegant entertainments get the better of the principles and judgments of men and women, there is no knowing where they will stop, nor into what evils, natural, moral, or political, they will lead us.
John Quincy Adams
19.
In my opinion, better far it be To destroy vanity within my life Than to destroy my life in vanity.
Juana Inés de la Cruz
20.
You will not persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.
Thomas Harris
21.
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 Wortley Montagu
22.
Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.
Jane Austen
23.
Talking much is a sign of vanity, for the one who is lavish with words is cheap in deeds.
Walter Raleigh
24.
He who wants to educate himself in Chess must evade what is dead in Chess... the habit of playing with inferior opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief, everything that leas to standstill or to anarchy.
Emanuel Lasker
25.
You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion.
Gustav Mahler
26.
It is personal vanity of the most flagrant type which intrudes itself, unasked, into other people's affairs. There are few of us who do not feel capable of ordering the daily lives of others, down to the most minute detail.
Myrtle Reed
27.
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
28.
My father said, Politics asks the question: Is it expedient? Vanity asks: Is it popular? But conscience asks: Is it right?
Dexter Scott King
29.
It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption, too, after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth, to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to it all.
Heinrich Heine
30.
The best way to sell yourself to others is first to sell the others to yourself. Check yourself against this list of obstacles to a pleasing personality: interrupting others; sarcasm; vanity; being a poor listener; insincere flattery; finding fault; challenging others without good cause; giving unsolicited advice; complaining; attitude of superiority; envy of others' success; poor posture and dress.
Harold Geneen
31.
Aided and abetted by corrupt analysts, patients who have nothing better to do with their lives often use the psychoanalytic situation to transform insignificant childhood hurts into private shrines at which they worship unceasingly the enormity of the offenses committed against them. This solution is immensely flattering to the patients -- as are all forms of unmerited self-aggrandizement; it is immensely profitable for the analysts -- as are all forms pandering to people's vanity; and it is often immensely unpleasant for nearly everyone else in the patient's life.
Thomas Szasz
32.
Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
34.
Where there is emulation, there will be vanity; where there is vanity, there will be folly.
Samuel Johnson
35.
It's not vanity to feel you have a right to be beautiful. Women are taught to feel we're not good enough, that we must live up to someone else's standards. But my aim is to cherish myself as I am.
Elle Macpherson
36.
I am content with nothing,
restless and ambitious...
and I despise myself for the vanity,
which formed half the stimulus to my exertions.
Oh would that I were one of those plodding wise fools who having once set their hand to the plough go on nothing doubting.
Thomas Huxley
37.
Vanity in its idler moments is benevolent, is as willing to give pleasure as to take it, and accepts as sufficient reward for its services a kind word or an approving smile.
Alexander Smith
38.
Men have had the vanity to pretend that the whole creation was made for them, while in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence.
Camille Flammarion
39.
It is only luxury and avarice that make poverty grievous to us; for it is a very small matter that does our business, and when we have provided against cold, hunger, and thirst, all the rest is but vanity and excess.
Seneca the Younger
40.
And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?
Charles Dickens
41.
Conceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up.
John Ruskin
42.
There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.
Tennessee Williams
43.
Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things
Gilles Deleuze
44.
If you have to tell them who you are, you aren't anybody.
Gregory Peck
45.
Let us think often that our only business in this life is to please God. Perhaps all besides is but folly and vanity.
Brother Lawrence
46.
Vanity keeps persons in favor with themselves who are out of favor with all others.
William Shakespeare
47.
How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken?’ Milkman asked. Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that [stuff]. Wanna fly, you got to give up the [stuff] that weighs you down.’ The peacock jumped onto the hood of the Buick and once more spread its tail, sending the flashy Buick into oblivion.
Toni Morrison
48.
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
49.
Bodybuilding is men on a stage in their underwear wearing brown paint showing other men their muscles. It is training for appearance only, and at the contest level requires a degree of vanity, narcissism, and self-absorption that I find distasteful and odd
Mark Rippetoe
50.
So I want to identify, if I can, the most important thing that we discover in life. At least, it is the most important thing that I have discovered. I will share it with you, like a precious jewel, fit for this occasion. I refer to love. Love for one another. Love for our community. Love for others everywhere in the world. Love transcends even scholarship, cleverness and university degrees. It is greater than pride and wealth. It endures when worldly vanities fade.
Michael Kirby