Vanity
The quality or state of being vain; want of substance to satisfy desire; emptiness; unsubstantialness; unrealness; falsity.
An inflation of mind upon slight grounds; empty pride inspired by an overweening conceit of one's personal attainments or decorations; an excessive desire for notice or approval; pride; ostentation; conceit.
That which is vain; anything empty, visionary, unreal, or unsubstantial; fruitless desire or effort; trifling labor productive of no good; empty pleasure; vain pursuit; idle show; unsubstantial enjoyment.
One of the established characters in the old moralities and puppet shows. See Morality, n., 5.
Related Definitions:
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Vanity Quotations
It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.
Mark Twain
Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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
All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
T. E. Lawrence
If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?
Vincent Van Gogh
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
Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.
Jane Austen
By rendering the labor of one, the property of the other, they cherish pride, luxury, and vanity on one side; on the other, vice and servility, or hatred and revolt.
James Madison
Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.
George Eliot
It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed "Wisdom." And then I know exactly what is going to follow: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Vanity is but the surface.
Blaise Pascal
Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.
Blaise Pascal
The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.
Blaise Pascal
Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.
Victor Hugo
Stupidity talks, vanity acts.
Victor Hugo
I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.
John Keats
Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.
Franz Kafka
The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.
Michel de Montaigne
There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.
Michel de Montaigne
Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain - at least in a poor country like Russia - and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.
Leon Trotsky
Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
Robert Louis Stevenson
What we call generosity is for the most part only the vanity of giving; and we exercise it because we are more fond of that vanity than of the thing we give.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
We say little, when vanity does not make us speak.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
More Vanity Quotations
Vanity Translations
vanity in Dutch is nietigheid, ijdelheid
vanity in German is Eitelkeit, Einbildung
vanity in Latin is irritum
vanity in Spanish is vanidad
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