#vanity

The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need. ↗

— Napoleon Bonaparte

#herd #influence #need #out #sake

Vanity can easily overtake wisdom. It usually overtakes common sense. ↗

— Julian Casablancas

#common sense #easily #overtake #overtakes #sense

Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich. ↗

— Nicolas Chamfort

#fashion #industry #levied #poor #rich

The day when a sportsman stops thinking above all else of the happiness in his own effort and the intoxication of the power and physical balance he derives from it, the day when he lets considerations of vanity or interest take over, on this day his ideal will die. ↗

— Pierre de Coubertin

#balance #considerations #day #derives #die

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

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

Now I feel and I say all the time that vanity is, like, long gone. I'm really free of worrying about what I look like, because it's out of my shaky hands. I don't control it. So why would I waste one second of my life worrying about it? ↗

— Michael J. Fox

#because #control #feel #free #gone

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

#calls #come #conscience #conviction #everything

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

— David Hewson

#threat #vanity #men

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