Vanity is a static thing. It puts it faith in what it has, and is easily wounded. Pride is active, and satisfied only with what it can do, hence accustomed not to feel small stings.
Interpretation
Vanity focuses on external validation while pride is rooted in personal achievement.
This quote by Jacques Barzun highlights the fundamental differences between vanity and pride. Vanity is characterized by a reliance on external validation and material possessions, making it fragile and easily hurt by criticism. In contrast, pride is associated with self-worth derived from one's actions and accomplishments, allowing it to withstand challenges and not feel diminished by minor setbacks. Thus, Barzun suggests that a robust sense of pride is more fulfilling and resilient than the superficial nature of vanity.
In practice
In a motivational speech about self-acceptance and inner strength.
Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
Machines are admirable and tyrannize only with the user's consent. Where, then, is the enemy? Not where the machine gives relief from drudgery but where human judgment abdicates. The smoothest machine-made product of the age is the organization man, for even the best organizing principle tends to corrupt, and the mechanical principle corrupts absolutely.
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
I can only think that the book is read because it deals with the difficulties of schooling, which do not change. Please note: the difficulties, not the problems. Problems are solved or disappear with the revolving times. Difficulities remain. It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and start one's education or anothers.
Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated, will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though never said, that uttering nonsense and half-truth without cease ends by destroying Intellect
But every soil becomes finally exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must always come once more.
You can study God through everything and everyone in the universe, because God is not confined in a mosque, synagogue or church. But if you are still in need of knowing where exactly His abode is, there is only one place to look for Him: in the heart of a true lover.
What most needs explanation is not why some people are criminals, but why most people are not.
I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.
The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.
The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.