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.
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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
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
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
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
Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.
George Eliot
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 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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