Vanity Plates

Famous quotes containing the words vanity and/or plates:

“Alas! While your ambitious vanity is unceasingly laboring to cover the earth with statues, with monuments, and with inscriptions to eternalize, if possible, your names, and give yourselves an existence, when this body is no more, why must we be condemned to live and die unknown?”
—Thomas Paine 1737–1809, U.S. writer and magazine editor. Pennsylvania Magazine, pp. 362-4 (1775)

“I have experienced such simple delight in the trivial matters of fishing and sporting, formerly, as might have inspired the muse of Homer or Shakespeare; and now, when I turn the pages and ponder the plates of the Angler’s Souvenir, I am fain to exclaim,—
“Can such things be,
And overcome us like a summer’s cloud?””
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)