William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes
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Sir, Respect Your Dinner: idolize it, enjoy it properly. You will be many hours in the week, many weeks in the year, and many years in your life happier if you do.
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What money is better bestowed than that of a schoolboy's tip? How the kindness is recalled by the recipient in after days! It blesses him that gives and him that takes.
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If fun is good, truth is still better, and love best of all.
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True love is better than glory.
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Kindnesses are easily forgotten; but injuries! what worthy man does not keep those in mind?
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As if the ray which travels from the sun would reach me sooner than the man who blacks my boots.
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The affection of young ladies is of as rapid growth as Jack's beanstalk, and reaches up to the sky in a night.
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If I mayn't tell you what I feel, what is the use of a friend?
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We have only to change the point of view and the greatest action looks mean.
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What a dignity it gives an old lady, that balance at the bankers! How tenderly we look at her faults if she is a relative; what a kind, good-natured old creature we find her!
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Remember, it's as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.
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There is a certain sort of man whose doom in the world is disappointment, who excels in it, and whose luckless triumphs in his meek career of life, I have often thought, must be regarded by the kind eyes above with as much favor as the splendid successes and achievements of coarser and more prosperous men.
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Business first; pleasure afterwards.
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To endure is greater than to dare; to tire out hostile fortune; to be daunted my no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it; to go through intrigue spotless; to forgo even ambition when the end is gained - who can say this is not greatness?
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Money has only a different value in the eyes of each.
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Certain it is that scandal is good brisk talk, whereas praise of one's neighbor is by no means lively hearing. An acquaintance grilled, scored, devilled, and served with mustard and cayenne pepper excites the appetite; whereas a slice of cold friend with currant jelly is but a sickly, unrelishing meat.
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Sure, occasion is the father of most that is good in us.
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What is it to be a gentleman? Is it to be honest, to be gentle, to be generous, to be brave, to be wise, and, possessing all these qualities, to exercise them in the most graceful outward manner? Ought a gentleman to be a loyal son, a true husband, an honest father? Ought his life to be decent, his bills to be paid, his taste to be high and elegant, his aims in life lofty and noble?
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All is vanity, nothing is fair.
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To describe love – making is immoral and immodest; you know it is. To describe it as it really is, or would appear to you and me as lookers – on, would be to describe the most dreary farce, to chronicle the most tautological twaddle. To take note of sighs, hand – squeezes, looks at the moon, and so forth – does this business become our dignity as historians? Come away from those foolish young people – they don't want us; and dreary as their farce is, and tautological as their twaddle, you may be sure it amuses them, and that they are happy enough without us.
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Werther had a love for Charlotte Such as words could never utter; Would you know how first he met her? She was cutting bread and butter.
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People hate as they love, unreasonably.
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To be rich, to be famous? do these profit a year hence, when other names sound louder than yours, when you lie hidden away under ground, along with the idle titles engraven on your coffin? But only true love lives after you, follows your memory with secret blessings or pervades you, and intercedes for you. Non omnis moriar, if, dying, I yet live in a tender heart or two; nor am lost and hopeless, living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me.