Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes

If you live for this world, you are in the junk business. It's all just premature junk.

I enjoy vanity . But I can't stick to any of that lifestyle for too long because, when its true colors come out, it's empty and cold and soulless.

It's all very well setting up your own brand of face cream or exercise wear - but Christ, it's so shallow.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.

I've been to MTV and all of that worldly stuff. It's death. It's meaningless.

If you want to be a star, don't bother doing it because it ends up being very empty.

I came to feel very, very sentimental about those sets, which is ludicrous, because they represent everything which is transitory and insubstantial. It's absurd that one should feel sentimental about timber and canvas.

Though beauty gives you a weird sense of entitlement, it's rather frightening and threatening to have others ascribe such importance to something you know you're just renting for a while.

I discover that my friends think only of my apparel, and those upon whom I have conferred acts of kindness prefer to remind me of my errors.

I'm just shocked at how blatantly shallow people are sometimes.

Oh, how swiftly the glory of the world passes away!

At root fame is a sham. I'm not going to live forever and if I am I certainly need don't you to tell me that so that I will buy a car or a box of dried up crackers.

It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed 'Wisdom.' And then I know exactly what is going to follow: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'

My mother kept all my awards on the sideboard of her front room, and she polished them. She polished everything religiously. And it doesn't take long for the very thin layer of gold to disappear and the base metal underneath to show through.

A lot of my music is just self-observation. Like telling you, "Oh man. What did I just do? How much did I just pay for this chain? Why did I do that? Wait a minute." Let me talk about that. Or like, the temptation. Let me talk about that. Let me observe myself.

Vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last,--a long way leading nowhere.

Titles are tinsel, power a corrupter, glorya bubble, and excessive wealth a libel on its possessor.

What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise.

If you give your soul up to anything earthly, whether it be the wealth, or the honours, or the pleasures of this world, you might as well hunt after the mirage of the desert or try to collect the mists of the morning, or to store up for yourself the clouds of the sky, for all these things are passing away.

I have little patience with anyone who is not self-satisfied. I am always pleased to see my friends, happy to be with my wife and family, but the high spot of every day is when I first catch a glimpse of myself in the shaving mirror.

everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death

How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.

Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind.

Fame and fortune, how empty they can be.