#vanity

Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#emile #life #simplicity #vanity #life

He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietzsche.) A vain person is always vain about something. He overestimates the importance of some quality or exaggerates the degree to which he possesses it, but the quality has some real importance and he does possess it to some degree. The fantasy of overestimation or exaggeration makes the vain person comic, but the fact that he cannot be vain about nothing makes his vanity a venial sin, because it is always open to correction by appeal to objective fact. A proud person, on the other hand, is not proud of anything, he is proud, he exists proudly. Pride is neither comic nor venial, but the most mortal of all sins because, lacking any basis in concrete particulars, it is both incorrigible and absolute: one cannot be more or less proud, only proud or humble. Thus, if a painter tries to portray the Seven Deadly Sins, his experience will furnish him readily enough with images symbolic of Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Anger, Avarice, and Envy, for all these are qualities of a person’s relations to others and the world, but no experience can provide an image of Pride, for the relation it qualifies is the subjective relation of a person to himself. In the seventh frame, therefore, the painter can only place, in lieu of a canvas, a mirror. ↗

— W.H. Auden

#vanity #anger

Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. ↗

— Jane Austen

#blindness #denial #folly #love #refusal

We must remember that possession of physical beauty can easily weaken the moral faculty. ↗

— Frank Tallis

#morality #vanity #weakness #beauty

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

#pride #vanity #think

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

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

#indifference #shyness #vanity #devil

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