William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes
-
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.
-
How hard it is to make an Englishman acknowledge that he is happy! Pendennis. Book ii. Chap. xxxi.
-
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?
-
Those we love can but walk down to the pier with us - the voyage we must make alone.
-
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.
-
People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.
-
There is no good in living in a society where you are merely the equal of everybody else. The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors.
-
It's a great comfort to some people to groan over their imaginary ills.
-
I wonder is it because men are cowards in heart that they admire bravery so much, and place military valor so far beyond every other quality for reward and worship.
-
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.
-
I never was much of an oyster eater, nor can I relish them 'in naturalibus' as some do, but require a quantity of sauces, lemons, cayenne peppers, bread and butter, and so forth, to render them palatable.
-
Malice is of the boomerang character, and is apt to turn upon the projector.
-
At certain periods of life, we live years of emotion in a few weeks, and look back on those times as on great gaps between the old life and the new.
-
Diffidence is a sort of false modesty.
-
You, who are ashamed of your poverty, and blush for your calling, are a snob; as are you who boast of your wealth.
-
A good woman is the loveliest flower that blooms under heaven; and we look with love and wonder upon its silent grace, its pure fragrance, its delicate bloom of beauty.
-
Pray, dear madam, another glass; it is Christmas time, it will do you no harm.
-
Those who forgets their friends to follow those of a higher status are truly snobs.
-
You can't order remembrance out of the mind; and a wrong that was a wrong yesterday must be a wrong to-morrow.
-
He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob.
-
The ladies--Heaven bless them!--are, as a general rule, coquettes from babyhood upwards.
-
This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is - A sort of soup or broth, or brew, Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes, That Greenwich never could outdo; Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron, Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace; All these you eat at Terre's tavern, In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.
-
Bravery never goes out of fashion.
-
The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.