"Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man"
About this Quote
Vanity, Stevenson suggests, isn’t a harmless quirk of personality; it’s a parasite with survival instincts. The line turns on a dark joke: we like to imagine death as the great equalizer, stripping away illusions and forcing humility. Stevenson flips that comfort. Some people don’t just carry vanity to the grave - they outsource it. Reputation, legacy, the curated afterlife of a name: vanity becomes a system that keeps working even when the owner is gone.
The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “Dies hard” borrows the language of stubborn diseases and battlefield injuries, treating self-regard as something you have to kill, not simply outgrow. “Obstinate cases” reads like a clinician’s note, cool and faintly amused, as if Stevenson is diagnosing a chronic condition in the human animal. Then the sting: “outlives the man.” Not “the person,” but “the man,” narrowing it to the social creature - the one invested in status, posterity, and how the story gets told.
Context matters: Stevenson wrote in a Victorian world obsessed with respectability, moral optics, and the machinery of public image (reviews, salons, imperial achievement, family name). For a professional writer, the temptation of immortality is especially sharp: the work is built to outlast the body, and the ego often tries to hitch a ride. The subtext is skeptical, almost anticlerical in spirit: don’t count on mortality to make anyone pure. Vanity is adaptive; it learns new habitats, including yours, after you’re dead.
The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “Dies hard” borrows the language of stubborn diseases and battlefield injuries, treating self-regard as something you have to kill, not simply outgrow. “Obstinate cases” reads like a clinician’s note, cool and faintly amused, as if Stevenson is diagnosing a chronic condition in the human animal. Then the sting: “outlives the man.” Not “the person,” but “the man,” narrowing it to the social creature - the one invested in status, posterity, and how the story gets told.
Context matters: Stevenson wrote in a Victorian world obsessed with respectability, moral optics, and the machinery of public image (reviews, salons, imperial achievement, family name). For a professional writer, the temptation of immortality is especially sharp: the work is built to outlast the body, and the ego often tries to hitch a ride. The subtext is skeptical, almost anticlerical in spirit: don’t count on mortality to make anyone pure. Vanity is adaptive; it learns new habitats, including yours, after you’re dead.
Quote Details
| Topic | Pride |
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