William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes
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To be thought rich is as good as to be rich.
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The world is full of love and pity, I say. Had there been less suffering, there would have been less kindness.
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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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An immense percentage of snobs, I believe, is to be found in every rank of this mortal life.
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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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Benevolence and feeling ennoble the most trifling actions.
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Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?-Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
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What woman, however old, has not the bridal-favours and raiment stowed away, and packed in lavender, in the inmost cupboards of her heart?
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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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An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through.
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Life without laughing is a dreary blank.
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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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How hard it is to make an Englishman acknowledge that he is happy! Pendennis. Book ii. Chap. xxxi.
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Oh, those women! They nurse and cuddle their presentiments, and make darlings of their ugliest thoughts.
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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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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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It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.
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Those we love can but walk down to the pier with us - the voyage we must make alone.
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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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A crow, who had flown away with a cheese from a dairy window, sate perched on a tree looking down at a great big frog in a pool underneath him.
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When a man is in love with one woman in a family, it is astonishing how fond he becomes of every person connected with it.
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Ah me! we wound where we never intended to strike; we create anger where we never meant harm; and these thoughts are the thorns in our cushion. - William Makepeace Thackeray
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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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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?