Quotes about Vanity

Vanity can easily overtake wisdom. It usually overtakes common sense.

Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave.

That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true — not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet.

How quickly passes away the glory of this world.

Yet with great toil all that I can attain by long experience, and in learned schools, is for to know my knowledge is but vain, and those that think them wise, are greatest fools.

He who is greedy of credit and reputation after his death, doth not consider, that they themselves by whom he is remembered, shall soon after every one of them be dead; and they likewise that succeed those; until at last all memory, which hitherto by the succession of men admiring and soon after dying hath had its course, be quite extinct.

How free from all vanity he carried himself in matter of honour and dignity, (as they are esteemed:) his laboriousness and assiduity, his readiness to hear any man, that had aught to say tending to any common good:

In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.

Remember this: in no time at all both you and he will be dead, and shortly after that not even our names will remain.

There's nothing more insufferable than people who boast about their own humility.

Vanity is the greatest seducer of reason: when you are most convinced your work is important, that is when you are most under its spell.

Come tutte le cose rapidamente svaniscano, nel cosmo i corpi stessi, nel tempo il loro ricordo;