This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Like flakes of snow that fall imperceptibly upon the earth, the seemingly unimportant events of life succeed one another. As snowflakes gather, so our habits are formed. No single flake that is added to the pile produces a sensible change. No single action creates, however it may exhibit a man's character. But as the tempest hurls the avalanche down the mountain and overwhelms the inhabitant and his habitation, so passion, acting on the elements of mischief which pernicious habits have brought together, may overthrow the edifice of truth and virtue.
Action | Change | Character | Earth | Events | Life | Life | Man | Passion | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |
Wine heightens indifference into love, love into jealousy, and jealousy into madness. It often turns the good-natured man into an idiot, and the choleric into an assassin. It give bitterness to resentment, it makes vanity insupportable, and displays every little spot of the soul in its utmost deformity.
Bitterness | Good | Indifference | Jealousy | Little | Love | Madness | Man | Resentment | Soul |
Avoid singularity. There may often be less vanity in following the new modes than in adhering to the old ones. It is true that the foolish invent them, but the wise may conform to, instead of contradicting, them.
Singularity | Wise | Following | Old |
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
It is not to be imagined by how many different ways vanity defeats its own purpose.
Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
There is no limit to the vanity of this world. Each spoke in the wheel thinks the whole strength of the wheel depends upon it.
Nothing can exceed the vanity of our existence but the folly of our pursuits.
You fear to quit the medleys of the world, where vanity reigns, where avarice tarnishes the most beautiful virtues, where infidelity holds dominion with the sway of a despot, where virtue is trampled under foot and vice carries off the prize of honor.
Avarice | Despot | Fear | Honor | Virtue | Virtue | World | Infidelity | Vice |
Arthur Helps, fully Sir Arthur Helps
Offended vanity is the great separator in social life.
Tecumseh, aka Tecumtha or Tekamthi NULL
They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer.
Avarice | Man | Oppression |
Jealousy, passion, vanity drive one out of the world.
Prosperity and Vanity are often lodg'd together. Prosperity destroys Fools, endangers the Wise, Prosperity has every Thing cheap. Prosperity knows not the worth of Patience. Prosperity takes no Counsel, and fears no Calamity. Prosperous Men seldom mend their Faults.
Calamity | Counsel | Men | Patience | Prosperity | Wise | Worth |
To pretend to devotion without great humility and renunciation of all worldly tempers is to pretend to impossibilities. He that would be devout must first be humble, have a full sense of his own miseries and wants and the vanity of the world, and then his soul will be full of desire after God. A proud, or vain, or worldly-minded man may use a manual of prayers, but he cannot be devout, because devotion is the application of an humble heart to God as its only happiness.
Desire | Devotion | God | Heart | Humility | Man | Sense | Soul | Wants | Will | World | God |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Bring together all the children of the universe, you will see nothing in them but innocence, gentleness, and fear; were they born wicked, spiteful, and cruel, some signs of it would come from them; as little snakes strive to bite, and little tigers to tear. But nature having been of offensive weapons to man as to pigeons and rabbits, it cannot have given them an instinct to mischief and destruction.
Children | Fear | Gentleness | Innocence | Instinct | Little | Man | Nature | Nothing | Universe | Weapons | Will |
Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault
Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them.
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
Human reason exhausts itself ceaselessly to explain the inexplicable. Explanation itself is high comedy, as preposterous as trying to see the back of one's own head, but the vanity of the ego is boundless, and it becomes even more overblown by this very attempt to make sense of nonsense. The mind, in its identity with the ego, cannot by definition, comprehend reality; if it could, it would instantly dissolve itself upon recognizing its own illusory nature. It's only beyond the paradox of mind transcending ego that what IS stands forth, self-evident and dazzling in its infinite Absoluteness. And then all of these words are useless.
Comedy | Ego | Mind | Nature | Nonsense | Paradox | Reality | Reason | Self | Sense | Words |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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.