Category: VAINGLORY

  • If we had a chance to have some outstanding quality, which would, however, remain hidden, the prideful would be tempted, but the glory-lovers would walk away. The whole point for the vainglorious is that others take notice. When we are plagued by this vice, we need people to nod and smile approvingly when we walk by. Vainglory disposes us to be more concerned with our reputation (what others think about us) than with what we really are. For the vainglorious, image is everything.

    Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies
    Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

  • The vainglorious, on the other hand, do not aspire to something because it is excellent. Rather, they seek whatever will bring in the most public applause, whether deserving or not. Pride is a desire for genuine status; vainglory, a desire for recognition and acclaim.

    Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies
    Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

  • When we are afraid that we will not be accepted by others, that we won’t fit in or live up to others’ expectations, and thus do our best to hide behind a falsely inflated reputation—this is vainglory.


    Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies
    Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

  • When God recedes in order to educate us, this brings great sadness, humility and even some measure of despair to the soul. The purpose of this is to humble the soul’s tendency to vanity and self-glory, for the heart at once is filled with fear of God, tears of thankfulness, and great longing for the beauty of silence.

    —St. Diadochus of Photiki

  • We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavor to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence, and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.

    —Blaise Pascal, Pensées

  • Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a soldier’s servant, a cook, a porter brags, and wishes to have his admirers. Even philosophers wish for them. Those who write against it want to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it desire the glory of having read it. I who write this have perhaps this desire, and perhaps those who will read it.

    —Blaise Pascal, Pensées

  • How mad is he who leaves the lecture-room in a happy frame of mind simply because of applause from the ignorant! Why do you take pleasure in being praised by men whom you yourself cannot praise?

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

  • Some boast of their faults. Do you think that the man has any thought of mending his ways who counts over his vices as if they were virtues?

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

  • How strangely men act! They will not praise those who are living at the same time and living with themselves; but to be themselves praised by posterity, by those whom they have never seen nor ever will see, this they set much value on.

    —Marcus Aurelius, Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

  • Thinkers can be divided into those who think in the first instance for their own instruction and those who do so for the instruction of others. The former are genuine thinkers for themselves in both senses of the words: they are the true philosophers. They alone are in earnest. The pleasure and happiness of their existence consists in thinking. The latter are sophists: they want to appear as thinkers and seek their happiness in what they hope thereby to get from others. This is what they are in earnest about. To which of these two classes a man belongs may quickly be seen by his whole style and manner.

    —Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms