#vanity

[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

#art #criticism #desire #films #gravity

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

#suicide #vanity #kill

Never lose a chance of saying a kind word. ↗

— William Makepeace Thackeray

#vanity

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

#tod #vanity #vanity

In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone. ↗

— William Makepeace Thackeray

#vanity

La vanidad se encuentra en los lugares más inesperados: al lado de la bondad, de la abnegación, de la generosidad. ↗

— Ernesto Sabato

#vanity

A person can't help their birth. ↗

— William Makepeace Thackeray

#vanity

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

#insignificance #unpopularity #vanity #vanity

I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself. ↗

— Julio Cortázar

#writing #vanity

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

#hedonish #selfishness #vanity #pessimism