William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes
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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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Diffidence is a sort of false modesty.
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You, who are ashamed of your poverty, and blush for your calling, are a snob; as are you who boast of your wealth.
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Are not there little chapters in everybody's life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?
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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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Oh, those women! They nurse and cuddle their presentiments, and make darlings of their ugliest thoughts.
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He who meanly admires a mean thing is a snob--perhaps that is a safe definition of the character.
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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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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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The ladies--Heaven bless them!--are, as a general rule, coquettes from babyhood upwards.
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Kindness is very indigestible. It disagrees with very proud stomachs.
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We can't all be lions in this world. There must be some lambs, harmless, kindly, gregarious creatures for eating and shearing.
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Forgotten tones of love recur to us, and kind glances shine out of the past – oh so bright and clear! – oh so longed after! – because they are out of reach; as holiday music from within a prison wall – or sunshine seen through the bars; more prized because unattainable – more bright because of the contrast of present darkness and solitude, whence there is no escape.
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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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Those who forgets their friends to follow those of a higher status are truly snobs.
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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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Alas! we are the sport of destiny.
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As nature made every man with a nose and eyes of his own, she gave him a character of his own, too; and yet we, O foolish race! must try our very best to ape some one or two of our neighbors, whose ideas fit us no more than their breeches!
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It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England.
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The tallest and the smallest among us are so alike diminutive and pitifully base, it is a meanness to calculate the difference.
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Malice is of the boomerang character, and is apt to turn upon the projector.
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Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?
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That which we call a snob by any other name would still be snobbish.