vanity

Robert Ashford possessed one of the key character flaws necessary to a traitor. He thought he was smarter than everyone else. This allowed the overeducated career bureaucrat to sell out his own country, because he believed he knew what was best for his nation and its people.

Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: 'I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.' Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty.

My vanity suggested I should take offense, but the deeper part of me was relieved- relieved that he was noble enough to want to make such a sacrifice from his heart rather than from his desire to impress me.

He wil sooner lose his best friend, then his least jest.

Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment

It is vanity to chase the whirlwind.

Hairspray and blusher, eyelash curlers, eye-shadow palettes the size of tea-trays. Even before they left school it was as if they were already rehearsing for some witless kind of womanhood.

Doesn't matter how pretty you are. What's important is how pretty you feel. No one feels pretty when they hear "no" often enough.

She was the most alone person he had ever met - so intent on staying forever breathtaking that she could never let any of life's glories take her own breath away.

She seemed to be lovely still to herself, as if no amount of looking into mirrors could ruin her illusion.

Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth; and, at fifty-four, was still a very fine man. Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did; nor could the valet of any new-made lord be more delighted with the place he held in society. He considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliot, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion.

Blacheville smiles with the self-satisfied smugness of a man whose vanity is tickled

But the vain man did not hear him. Vain men never hear anything but praise.

Those who seek enjoyment in life are the ones that think that the world is a playground.

I believe the secret of the success of psychoanalysis resides in people's vanity.

Why do you chase the wind?

Her eyes are shockingly black - shocking not because black eyes are particularly rare, but because she's wearing smoky gray eyeshadow and dark eyeliner to accentuate them further. Makeup, while the world is ending.

Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken, themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.