#vanity

My vanity was flattered by having been mistaken for our revered sovereign. I ordered a banquet to be got ready for the following evening, under the trees before my house, and invited the whole town. ↗

— Adelbert von Chamisso

#been #before #evening #flattered #following

Pleasure is a shadow, wealth is vanity, and power a pageant; but knowledge is ecstatic in enjoyment, perennial in frame, unlimited in space and indefinite in duration. ↗

— DeWitt Clinton

#ecstatic #enjoyment #frame #indefinite #knowledge

I have this theory that people in Hollywood don't read. They read 'Vanity Fair' and then consider themselves terribly well read. I think I can basically write about anybody without getting caught. ↗

— Jackie Collins

#anybody #basically #caught #consider #fair

Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity. ↗

— Abraham Cowley

#enough #few #few people #foolishness #knowledge

If there is a single quality that is shared by all great men, it is vanity. ↗

— Yousuf Karsh

#great men #men #quality #shared #single

Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people. ↗

— Garrison Keillor

#far #gentle #greed #look #never

For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better. ↗

— E. M. Forster

#better #changed #characters #even #hold

In their vanity men focus on what they wish to hear and miss the hidden meaning, the lurking threat. ↗

— David Hewson

#threat #vanity #men

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

#ego #fear #heart #life #love

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 Dostoyevsky

#christianity #conceit #god #liberal #nihilism