In a world where self-perception often affects our outlook and interactions, the concept of vanity takes on various meanings and nuances. While it is often seen in a negative light, portraying superficiality or excessive pride, vanity can also be a lens through which we examine self-awareness, confidence, and the human need for validation. Our curated collection of 77 inspiring vanity quotes delves into these complexities, offering reflections from a diverse array of thinkers, writers, and creatives. These quotes invite you to reconsider the intricate shadows of vanity, exploring its role in shaping personal growth and self-perception. Through these insights, we hope to inspire a balanced view of vanity, encouraging both introspection and a healthy self-regard.
1. “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
2. “...It often seemed to her that she thought too much about herself, you could have made her blush any day of the year, by telling her she was selfish. She was always planning out her own development, desiring her own perfection, observing her own progress. Her nature had for her own imagination a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring bows, of shady bowers and of lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one’s mind was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses.” - Henry James
3. “It is naturally given to all men to esteem their own inventions best.” - Sir Thomas More
4. “Why did you come in to-night with your heads in the air? 'Make way, we are coming! Give us every right and don't you dare breathe a word before us. Pay us every sort of respect, such as no one's ever heard of, and we shall treat you worse than the lowest lackey!' They strive for justice, they stand on their rights, and yet they've slandered him like infidels in their article. We demand, we don't ask, and you will get no gratitude from us, because you are acting for the satisfaction of your own conscience! Queer sort of reasoning!... He has not borrowed money from you, he doesn't owe you anything, so what are you reckoning on, if not his gratitude? So how can you repudiate it? Lunatics! They regard society as savage and inhuman, because it cries shame on the seduced girl; but if you think society inhuman, you must think that the girl suffers from the censure of society, and if she does, how is it you expose her to society in the newspapers and expect her not to suffer? Lunatics! Vain creatures! They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end by eating up one another, that's what I prophesy. Isn't that topsy-turvydom, isn't it infamy?” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
5. “guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.” - Toni Morrison
6. “I was sorry for her; I was amazed, disgusted at her heartless vanity; I wondered why so much beauty should be given to those who made so bad a use of it, and denied to some who would make it a benefit to both themselves and others.But, God knows best, I concluded. There are, I suppose, some men as vain, as selfish, and as heartless as she is, and, perhaps, such women may be useful to punish them.” - Anne Brontë
7. “I'm so pretty, it's hard for me to think of myself as intelligent.” - Jim Butcher
8. “You will be most readily cured of vanity or presumption by studying the history of music, and by hearing the master pieces which have been produced at different periods.” - Robert Schumann
9. “Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband's. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn't have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people's standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question "How do I look?” - Haruki Murakami
10. “Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.” - Blaise Pascal
11. “He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.” - Gustave Flaubert
12. “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.” - J. Michael Straczynski
13. “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
14. “The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts; but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?” - William Makepeace Thackeray
15. “But I begin to fancy you don't like me. How strange! I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me. (Catherine Linton, nee Earnshaw)” - Emily Brontë
16. “Without the errors which are active in every psychical pleasure and displeasrue a humanity would never have come into existence--whose fundamental feeling is and remains that man is the free being in a world of unfreedom, the external miracle worker whether he does good or ill, the astonishing exception, the superbeast and almost-god, the meaning of creation which cannot be thought away, the solution of the cosmic riddle, the mighty ruler over nature and the despiser of it, the creature which calls its history world history!--Vanitas vanitatum homo.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
17. “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
18. “But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.” - Oscar Wilde
19. “Lockhart'll sign anything if it stands still long enough.” - J.K. Rowling
20. “@bobbybaird i'm a writer, so are you. we try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. vain of us? a bit.” - Walter Kirn
21. “I am philosophical Christ; crucified on the cross of ignorance for the sake ofdivine vanity.” - Kedar Joshi
22. “We think we are being interesting to others when we are being interesting to ourselves.” - Jack Gardner
23. “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
24. “La vanidad se encuentra en los lugares más inesperados: al lado de la bondad, de la abnegación, de la generosidad.” - Ernesto Sabato
25. “She also considered very seriously what she would look like in a little cottage in the middle of the forest, dressed in a melancholy gray and holding communion only with the birds and trees; a life of retirement away from the vain world; a life into which no man came. It had its attractions, but she decided that gray did not suit her.” - A.A. Milne
26. “I hope the artist who illustrates this work will take care to do justice to his portrait. Mr. Clive himself, let that painter be assured, will not be too well pleased if his countenance and figure do not receive proper attention.” - William Makepeace Thackeray
27. “One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
28. “She trailed after him, admiring the line of his back. He began climbing the stairs, and she sighed with pleasure. Every bit of him was gorgeous. “Do you mind if I objectify you?”“Please do,” he said over his shoulder. “Particularly my knees, as they are oft-neglected.”“Maybe if you ever got your pants off, they wouldn’t be.”“It hardly matters, sweet; once they’ve come off, the attention isn’t likely to center on my absurdly handsome knees.” - Meljean Brook
29. “You are not permitted to kill a woman who has wronged you, but nothing forbids you to reflect that she is growing older every minute.” - Ambrose Bierce
30. “It was in the reign of George II. that the above-named personages lived and quarrelled ; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now” - William Makepeace Thackeray
31. “I'm amazing and studly, but I have limits.” - Jim Butcher
32. “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
33. “You'll forgive the flowery talk, won't you? Our family does so love to be told they are beautiful. Vanity is an old and venerable habit.” - Catherynne M. Valente
34. “I was good at being charming, one of my very few vanities.” - Jeff Lindsay
35. “It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne
36. “Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?” - Oscar Wilde
37. “Women that can work a camera with ease often work men just as effortlessly for both require the same commitment to vanity and manipulation.” - Tiffany Madison
38. “Killing animals to make a fashion statement = a sickening + cold-blooded vanity.” - Jess C. Scott
39. “I had only four hairs worth shaving, but I managed to inflict five cuts attempting to remove them.” - Troy Soos
40. “When you are in a room with Kurtis, whether its one or a hundred he is the only person that matters.” - Dee Remy
41. “Every men wanted to be his friend and every woman wanted to be in his bed” - Dee Remy
42. “The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it; for, however absurd it may be thought to boast an honour by an act which shows that it was conferred without merit, yet most men seem rather inclined to confess the want of virtue than of importance.” - Samuel Johnson
43. “As individuals die every moment, how insensitive and fabricated a love it is to set aside a day from selfish routine in prideful, patriotic commemoration of tragedy. Just as God is provoked by those who tithe simply because they feel that they must tithe, I am provoked by those who commemorate simply because they feel that they must commemorate.” - Criss Jami
44. “I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.” - Lionel Shriver
45. “He knows how to market himself well. Nowadays, that's all that seems to count. He's rebellious in a way that appeals to people with vain, shallow taste. So of course he manipulates his audiences with the blessing of his recording company and the financial investors behind his brand.” - Jess C. Scott
46. “Smile is the vainest thing you can wear without costing you anything” - bheng927
47. “Man is the vainest of allcreatures that have their being upon earth. As long as heavenvouchsafes him health and strength, he thinks that he shall come tono harm hereafter, and even when the blessed gods bring sorrow uponhim, he bears it as he needs must, and makes the best of it; forGod Almighty gives men their daily minds day by day. I know allabout it, for I was a rich man once, and did much wrong in thestubbornness of my pride, and in the confidence that my father andmy brothers would support me; therefore let a man fear God in allthings always, and take the good that heaven may see fit to sendhim without vainglory.” - Homer
48. “Clichés so often befall vain people.” - Ann Beattie
49. “The tyrant is a child of PrideWho drinks from his sickening cup Recklessness and vanity,Until from his high crest headlongHe plummets to the dust of hope.” - Sophocles
50. “All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster.” - Olaf Stapledon
51. “I thought of what pride would look like, a jowly old guy in a smoking jacket. Vanity was a tall, beautiful woman with a face like a mask. Envy was a treasure-hoarding dragon, dainty and diabolical. As I sketched in the dragon's face, I gave her eyebrows like mine, my turtle necklace around its scaly neck. Xanda drew them as cliffs and valleys, irrevocably linked pride as a mountain, envy as a valley, hating its lowness and longing to reach, overtake, conquer. She drew vanity as a volcano with an abyss at its core.” - Holly Cupala
52. “I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.” - Oscar Wilde
53. “Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself.” - Blaise Pascal
54. “All these handsome guys are the same. When they're done combing their goddam hair, they beat it on you.” - J.D. Salinger
55. “No-one loves another More than he loves whatever another within may haveThat is part of one's self” - Fernando Pessoa
56. “He wil sooner lose his best friend, then his least jest.” - Ben Jonson
57. “What a situation!' cried Miss Squeers; '...What is the reason that men fall in love with me, whether I like it or not, and desert their chosen intendeds for my sake?' 'Because they can't help it, miss,' replied the girl; 'the reason's plain.' (If Miss Squeers were the reason, it was very plain.)” - Charles Dickens
58. “Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites our curiosity and it appears interesting. In fighting for his God everyone, in fact, fights only for the interest of his own vanity, which, of all the passions produced bye the mal-organization of society, is the quickest to take offense, and the most capable of committing the greatest follies.” - Percy Bysshe Shelley
59. “It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch one another and find sympathy. We differ widely enough in our nobler qualities. It is in our follies that we are at one.” - Jerome K. Jerome
60. “The problem is hedonism. The problem is the preening vanity and selfishness of 'coming out,' of parading private inclinations, of a kind that repel normal people, as if those inclinations were, all by themselves, marks of authenticity and virtue, of suffering and oppression.” - John Derbyshire
61. “But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less ready shall we be to make use of the word ‘artificial.’ Nothing in the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many works of art are branded with artificiality because the exhibit vanity and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a voice out of the abyss.” - G.K. Chesterton
62. “The way you think about yourself determines your reality. You are not being hurt by the way people think about you. Many of those people are a reflection of how you think about yourself.” - Shannon L. Alder
63. “Hairspray and blusher, eyelash curlers, eye-shadow palettes the size of tea-trays. Even before they left school it was as if they were already rehearsing for some witless kind of womanhood.” - Alison Fell
64. “But I feel vanity is a part of art and the non-vain are really non-artistic.” - Barry Webster
65. “We must remember that possession of physical beauty can easily weaken the moral faculty.” - Frank Tallis
66. “Mirror Mirror on the Wall,Who's fairest of them all?I'm Mona Lisa and She is plain,But the truth is - we all are Vain.” - Saru Singhal
67. “She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant, but because she thought that Lily disliked her. It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.” - Edith Wharton
68. “One altar forever is preserved, that whereon we burn incense to the supreme idol,--ourselves, our god is great, and money is his Prophet! We devastate nature in order to make sacrifice to him; we boast that we have conquered Matter and forget that it is matter that has forever enslaved us.” - Okakura Kakuzo
69. “[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.” - Alain De Botton
70. “In their vanity men focus on what they wish to hear and miss the hidden meaning, the lurking threat.” - David Hewson
71. “Ecclesiastes would be quite unbearable were it not for Heavens eternity and its citizens". ~R. Alan Woods [2013]” - R. Alan Woods
72. “The Rose does not preen herself to catch my eye. She blooms because she blooms. A saint is a saint until he knows he is one.” - Anthony de Mello
73. “Love is responsible for nearly every kind of insanity in the world though greed, vanity, and pure meanness contribute their portion to general misery.” - P.N. Elrod
74. “The physical vanity of the diet-and-exercise obsessive is recast as the pursuit of a kind of ritual purity, hedged about with taboos and guilt trips and mysticized by yoga.” - Ross Douthat
75. “Vanity, right?" Nash reappeared in the living room with an open bag of potato chips. "I nominate my venerable brother. He likes to play hero, and one look at him should establish the vanity angle.""Nash!" I really shouldn't have been surprised by the dig. But I was."What?" He raised one brow at me in challenge. "It's okay to call me jealous, but not to call him vain?""Awareness of one's obvious advantages doesn't imply vanity," Tod insisted calmly.Nash turned on him. "Does it imply narcissism?"Tod huffed. "This coming from the guy who owns more hair products than his girlfriend.” - Rachel Vincent
76. “Don't be vain. What you look like doesn't matter. It's the deed that matters.” - Sarah Addison Allen
77. “I've loved many women...I'm not going to lie to you, but it never works...vanity always gets in the way.” - Cassandra Giovanni
