#vanity

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

God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything. ↗

— David Herbert Lawrence

#certain #conceited #countries #god #hate

I wouldn't say I'm vain - I'm just in a job where the way you look is important. Well, at least the facelift wasn't vanity, but the hair was. ↗

— Gary Numan

#hair #i #important #job #just

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse - why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another! ↗

— Richard Brinsley Sheridan

#always #another #anything #damned #foolish

The vanity of men, a constant insult to women, is also the ground for the implicit feminine claim of superior sensitivity and morality. ↗

— Patricia Meyer Spacks

#claim #constant #feminine #ground #implicit

I imagine my children are going to save me from my vanity and be my passion and fill whatever fears I have of the amazing time I'm having right now being gone. ↗

— Gwen Stefani

#amazing time #being #children #fears #fill

The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead. ↗

— George Savile

#doth #forget #man #oft #teaching

In an earlier age, it might have been possible to believe that goodness would prevail over pride, but not anymore. The proud could be proud with impunity, because there was nobody to contradict him in his pride and because narcissism was no longer considered a vice. That was what the whole cult of celebrity was about, she thought; and we fêted these people and fed their vanity. ↗

— Alexander McCall Smith

#narcisissism #pride #vanity #age

But I feel vanity is a part of art and the non-vain are really non-artistic. ↗

— Barry Webster

#vanity #art

I would have chosen any other than this for my prison. A rhinoceros is as ugly as a human being, and it too is going to die, but at least it never thinks that it is beautiful. ↗

— Peter S. Beagle

#beauty