A Quote by William Makepeace Thackeray

Vanity is often the unseen spur.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Quote Topics

Often Spur Unseen Vanity

Quote Author

William Makepeace Thackeray
English - Novelist
July 18, 1811 - December 24, 1863

If there is a single quality that is shared by all great men, it is vanity. But I mean by vanity only that they appreciate their own worth. Without this kind of vanity they would not be great. And with vanity alone, of course, a man is nothing.

Yousuf Karsh

Necessity is often the spur to genius.

Honore de Balzac

Bravery is often too sharp a spur.

Lajos Kossuth

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.

Jane Austen

An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it's beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth... Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.

Pope Francis

Difficult economic times, often spur great periods of creativity and invention.

Carisa Bianchi

It is often spur-of-the-moment decisions, sometimes made by others, that can change our whole lives.

Jeffrey Archer

I often arrive at quite sensible ideas and judgements, on the spur of the moment. It is when I stop to think that I become foolish.

Jerome K. Jerome

Why do you beat the air and run in vain? Every occupation has a purpose, obviously. Tell me then, what is the purpose of all the activity of the world? Answer, I challenge you! It is vanity of vanity: all is vanity.

Saint John Chrysostom

Vanity, in a fairy tale, will make you evil. Vanity in the real world will drive you nuts. Vanity makes you say things like “I deserved a better life than this.

Richard Siken

Emulation has been termed a spur to virtue, and assumes to be a spur of gold. But it is a spur composed of baser materials, and if tried in the furnace will be found to want that fixedness which is the characteristic of gold. He that pursues virtue, only to surpass others, is not far from wishing others less forward than himself; and he that rejoices too much at his own perfections will be too little grieved at the defects of other men.

Charles Caleb Colton

And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?

Charles Dickens

The awful shadow of some unseen Power Floats, tho' unseen, amongst us.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.