Vanity (n.) turns the unimportant into the important: the child bows awkwardly before a guest and the mother is angry — not at anything important, but because reflection upon herself makes it so.
Vanity (n.) believes it can dispense with the world, yet needs the world to notice that it does not need the world.
Vanity (n.) is knowing in yourself that you are not deceived and still finding it stupid that you should seem deceived to others.
Vanity (n.) would die of shame at having hoped for a man in vain — so it insures itself by hoping nothing, and finds loving hope infinitely laughable; but nothing foolish is infinite.
Vanity (n.) is betrayed by the phrase “on this occasion it occurs to me” — even in the most significant things such a man sees only an occasion for getting his smidgeon of comment noticed.
Vanity (n.) is earnestness in the Preacher's 'all is vanity'; said after earnestness is lost, it is only the defiance of melancholy or of frivolity, and one may weep or laugh.
Vanity (n.) is never so vain as a woman alone before her mirror; no comparison is as earnest as a man alone comparing himself with the equality of death.
Vanity (n.) holds more terrors for the imagination than the darkest night holds for a nervous person: danger, plots, envy and ghosts everywhere.
Vanity (n.) is what the pious man sees in the world: he tells the star at moonrise "I care not for you, you are darkened," and the running river, "keep running, you will never fill the sea."
Vanity (n.) is, in "all is vanity," a clever triviality to the light-minded, a riddle to the thoughtless, and a drug to the melancholy that makes the last state worse than the first.