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"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."
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"Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast."
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Personal Development
"I have a lot of vanity."
Author Name
Personal Development
"An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Fame is vanity's bait."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You think too much of your "toilette", Adele; but you may have a flower." I took a rose from a vase and fastened it in her sash. She sighed a sign of ineffable satisfaction, as if her cup of happiness were now full. I turned my face away to conceal a smile I could not suppress; there was something ludicrous as well as painful in the little Parisienne's earnest and innate devotion to matters of dress."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Even eighty-odd is sometimes vulnerable to vanity."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty."
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Personal Development
"The greatest crime in human history was not the creation of the armaments of warfare and destruction of life, but the invention of hand mirror, which enticed humankind to peer at their surface appearance instead of seeking spiritual salvation. Prior to the invention of the mirror, people saw themselves through other people's eyes or by looking deep within themselves."
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Personal Development
"Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded."
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Personal Development
"Vain until the bitter end."
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"Damn! What did Ansermet, that most faithful friend, know about Stravinsky's poverty of heart? What did he, that most devoted friend, know about Stravinsky's capacity to love? And where did he get his utter certainty that the heart is ethically superior to the brain? Are not vile acts committed as often with the heart's help as without it? Can't fanatics, with their bloody hands, boast of a high degree of "affective activity"? Will we ever be done with this imbecile sentimental Inquisition, the heart's Reign of Terror?"
Morality
"Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul, the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice."
Romance
"The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future."
Literature
"The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness."
Happiness
"All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of a hunting horn coming from the depths of distant forests. There were paths in those forests."
Solitude
"It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made."
Prejudice
"Given the nature of the human couple, the love of a man and a woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog...It is a completely selfless love."
Loyalty
"People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past."
Time
"He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street."
Escape
"Without much ardor but quite unmistakably, she was writhing her hips as if she were dancing. When he was very close, he saw' her gaping mouth: she was yawning lengthily, insatiably: the great open hole was rocking gently atop die mechanically dancing body. Jean-Marc thought: she's dancing and she's bored.He reached the seawall: down below, on the beach, he saw men with their heads thrown back releasing kites into the air. They were doing it with passion, and Jean-Marc recalled his old theory: there are three kinds of boredom: passive boredom: the girl dancing and yawning; active boredom: kite-lovers; and rebellious boredom: young people burning cars and smashing shop windows."
Boredom
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