Category: VAINGLORY

  • 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

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.

    This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both. And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Enemy forbids. Thus by inflaming the horror of the Same Old Thing we have recently made the Arts, for example, less dangerous to us than perhaps, they have ever been, ‘low-brow’ and ‘high-brow’ artists alike being now daily drawn into fresh, and still fresh, excesses of lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • When you draw closer to God, your desire to be known diminishes.

    —Fr. Mina Dimitri

  • We use our cars and clothing and career credentials to craft images of ourselves we wish to promote and project to others, while keeping much about ourselves carefully hidden from view.

    Vainglory: The Forgotten Vice
    Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

  • For whithersoever the soul of man turns itself, unless toward Thee, it is riveted upon sorrows, yea though it is riveted on things beautiful. 

    Confessions
    St. Augustine

  • Living doesn’t cost much, but showing off does.

    —Jeffrey D. Sachs

  • It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the most respected class?

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau