Vanity is truly the motive-power that moves humanity, and it is flattery that greases the wheels.

The most violent passions sometimes leave us at rest, but vanity agitates us constantly.

What renders other people s vanity insufferable is that it wounds our own.

He who denies his own vanity usually possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes to avoid the necessity of despising himself.

The most vulnerable and yet most unconquerable of things is human vanity; nay through being wounded its strength increases and can grow to giant proportions.

We crave support in vanity as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.

It is not vain-glory for a man and his glass to confer in his own chamber.

A vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance.

Such is the weakness of our nature, that when men are a little exalted in their condition they immediately conceive they have additional senses, and their capacities enlarged not only above other men, but above human comprehension itself.

There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.