After all, vanity is as much a virtue as a vice. It is easy to recite copy-book maxims against its sinfulness, but it is a passion that can move us to good as well as to evil. Ambition is only vanity ennobled. We want to win praise and admiration — or Fame as we prefer to name it — and so we write great books, and paint grand pictures, and sing sweet songs; and toil with willing hands in study, loom, and laboratory.

Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927) English writer, humorist [Jerome Klapka Jerome]

“On Vanity and Vanities,” The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1889)
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