Alex

“Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other's naked hearts.”
― Tennessee Williams

“Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night / The Last Tycoon