William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes
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It was in the reign of George II. that the above-named personages lived and quarrelled ; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now
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A pair of bright eyes with a dozen glances suffice to subdue a man; to enslave him, and enflame him; to make him even forget; they dazzle him so that the past becomes straightway dim to him; and he so prizes them that he would give all his life to possess 'em.
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A woman's heart is just like a lithographer's stone; what is once written upon it cannot be rubbed out.
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An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through.
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Pray God, keep us simple.
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To be thought rich is as good as to be rich.
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Never lose a chance of saying a kind word.
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How do men feel whose whole lives (and many men's lives are) are lies, schemes, and subterfuges? What sort of company do they keep when they are alone? Daily in life I watch men whose every smile is an artifice, and every wink is an hypocrisy. Doth such a fellow where a mask in his own privacy, and to his own conscience?
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Life is soul's nursery- its training place for the destinies of eternity.
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An immense percentage of snobs, I believe, is to be found in every rank of this mortal life.
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The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.
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It is all very well for you, who have probably never seen any spiritual manifestations, to talk as you do; but if you had seen what I have witnessed you would hold a different opinion.
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Choose a good disagreeable friend, if you be wise--a surly, steady, economical, rigid fellow.
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It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.
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Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish. Alas, the heart hardens as the blood ceases to run. The cold snow strikes down from the head, and checks the glow of feeling. Who wants to survive into old age after abdicating all his faculties one by one, and be sans teeth, sans eyes, sans memory, sans hope, sans sympathy?
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Life is a mirror: if you frown at it, it frowns back; if you smile, it returns the greeting.
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Life without laughing is a dreary blank.
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The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.
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Oh, those women! They nurse and cuddle their presentiments, and make darlings of their ugliest thoughts.
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Everybody in Vanity Fair must have remarked how well those live who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt; how they deny themselves nothing; how jolly and easy they are in their minds.
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Charlotte, having seen his body Borne before her on a shutter, Like a well-conducted person, Went on cutting bread and butter.
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Who was the blundering idiot who said 'fine words butter no parsnips'? Half the parsnips of society are served and rendered palatable with no other sauce.
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Tis misfortune that awakens ingenuity, or fortitude, or endurance, in hearts where these qualities had never come to life but for the circumstance which gave them a being.
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The pipe draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouth of the foolish; it generates a style of conversation, contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent, and unaffected.