Friedrich Nietzsche Vanity Quotations

Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.

Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.

Our vanity would have just that which we do best count as that which is hardest for us. The origin of many a morality.

One is honest about oneself either with a sense of shame or with vanity.

Is not wounded vanity the mother of all tragedies?

Just as bones, tissues, intestines, and blood vessels are enclosed in a skin that makes it possible to bear the sight of a human being, so the agitations and passions of the soul are wrapped up in vanity: it is the soul's skin.

Whether a man hides his bad qualities and vices or confesses them openly, his vanity wants to gain an advantage by it in both cases: just note how subtly he distinguishes between those he will hide his bad qualities from and those he will face honestly and candidly.

He who is usually self-sufficient becomes exceptionally vain and keenly alive to fame and praise when he is physically ill. The more he loses himself the more he has to endeavor to regain his position by means of the opinion of others.

For some natures, changing their opinions is just as much a requirement of cleanliness as changing their clothes: for others, however, it is merely a requirement of vanity.

That little hypocrites and half-crazed people dare to imagine that on their account the laws of nature are constantly broken; such an enhancement of every kind of selfishness to infinity, to impudence, cannot be branded with sufficient contempt. And yet Christianity owes its triumph to this pitiable flattery of personal vanity.

One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart--and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit.

Good deeds shun the light as anxiously as evil deeds: the latter fear that disclosure will bring on pain (as punishment), while the former fear that disclosure will take away pleasure (that pure pleasure, that pleasure per se, which immediately ceases once the vanity's satisfaction is added).

What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity which the most modest possesses when, in the midst of nature and the world, he feels himself to be man!

The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.

Vanity is the fear of appearing original: it is thus a lack of pride, but not necessarily a lack of originality.

The strongest knowledge (that of the total freedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: for it always has the strongest opponent, human vanity.

I have not the capability to give you my loyalty, nor do I have the vanity to appear as if I did.

One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, average ones to habit, and pretty ones to fear.

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.

Our vanity desires that what we do best should be considered what is hardest for us.

What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?