“Vanity and narcissism — the compulsive need to be admired and praised — undermine one's courage, for one then fights on someone else's conviction rather than one's own.”

“One must be ruthless with one’s own writing or someone else will be.”

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”

“Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own.”

“All action leads to suffering, someone else's, or one's own.”

“One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone.”

“Xenophon says that there is no sound more pleasing than one's own praises.”

“Pride is an established conviction of one’s own paramount worth in some particular respect, while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others, and it is generally accompanied by the secret hope of ultimately coming to the same conviction oneself. Pride works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.”

“I'm losing Savanna.
That's good. No one should own someone else.”

“He was too much concerned with his own perfection ever to think of admiring any one else.”