Daily Inspiration Quote by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Vanity, Ebner-Eschenbach suggests, isn’t merely self-love; it’s a compulsion to be mirrored back into existence by anyone within eyeshot. The line is built like a small trap: we pride ourselves on not caring about certain people, yet we still hunger for their approval. That contradiction is the point. She’s not diagnosing confidence but dependence - the ego as an economy that needs constant external currency, even from sources we claim are worthless.

The real sting is in the second “care.” The first is about affection or respect (“those we don’t care for”); the second is about obsession (“we even care for the opinion”). She uses the same verb to show how easily our emotional vocabulary collapses under scrutiny. Disdain doesn’t cancel desire; it can intensify it. If someone is beneath us, their judgment shouldn’t matter. When it does, our hierarchy is exposed as performance: we need the audience to boo or cheer so we can feel real.

As a late-19th-century novelist writing in the social pressure-cooker of Austro-Hungarian bourgeois life, Ebner-Eschenbach knew how reputations were manufactured in salons, newspapers, and polite circles where “not caring” was itself a status signal. The line anticipates modern attention culture with eerie precision: the subtweet, the hate-read, the compulsive check of comments from strangers you’d never invite to dinner. Vanity isn’t just wanting praise. It’s being unable to tolerate unregistered existence.