#vanity

I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#death #vanity #beauty

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

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#emile #life #simplicity #vanity #life

The physical vanity of the diet-and-exercise obsessive is recast as the pursuit of a kind of ritual purity, hedged about with taboos and guilt trips and mysticized by yoga. (Not for nothing does Amazon.com include diet and exercise books on its "Religion and Spirituality" bestseller list. ....) ↗

— Ross Douthat

#exercise #puritanical #purity #vanity #yoga

Pride is a wound, and vanity is the scab on it. One's life picks at the scab to open the wound again and again. In men, it seldom heals and often grows septic. ↗

— Michael Ayrton

#vanity #life

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

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

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

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him. ↗

— William Faulkner

#writing-advice #vanity

Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity, and their love to feed their pride. ↗

— Charles Caleb Colton

#feed #happiness #ladies #love #pride

I think it's good that people value their bodies and take care of them. I think if you cross the line and begin using your body as an asset or as an extension of your vanity, you've gone too far. ↗

— Peter Coyote

#begin #bodies #body #care #cross