
“Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
Epilogue
Brideshead Revisited (1945)
God Knows (1984)
“Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
Epilogue
Brideshead Revisited (1945)
If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.
Optimism (1903)
Conversation of 1934
Personal Recollections (1981)
“The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.”
Source: Beyond Good and Evil
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)
Discourses on the Condition of the Great
Context: All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are: it being difficult for those who regard themselves at heart as equal with all men... For this it is necessary for one to forget himself, and to believe that he has some real excellence above them, in which consists this illusion that I am endeavoring to discover to you.
Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 110
“vanity, like all social vices, craves for novelty;”
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)