William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes
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Love seems to survive life, and to reach beyond it. I think we take it with us past the grave. Do we not still give it to those who have left us? May we not hope that they feel it for us, and that we shall leave it here in one or two fond bosoms, when we also are gone?
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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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To be thought rich is as good as to be rich.
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Do not be in a hurry to succeed. What would you have to live for afterwards? Better make the horizon your goal; it will always be ahead of you.
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A person can't help their birth.
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Since the days of Adam, there has been hardly a mischief done in this world but a woman has been at the bottom of it.
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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.
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Why do they always put mud into coffee on board steamers? Why does the tea generally taste of boiled boots?
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We pass by common objects or persons without noticing them; but the keen eye detects and notes types everywhere and among all classes.
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One of the great conditions of anger and hatred is, that you must tell and believe lies against the hated object, in order, as we said, to be consistent.
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Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
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In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone.
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She had not character enough to take to drinking, and moaned about, slip-shod and in curl-papers, all day.
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It is from the level of calamities, not that of every-day life, that we learn impressive and useful lessons.
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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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If love lives through all life; and survives through all sorrow; and remains steadfast with us through all changes; and in all darkness of spirit burns brightly; and, if we die, deplores us for ever, and loves still equally; and exists with the very last gasp and throb of the faithful bosom--whence it passes with the pure soul, beyond death; surely it shall be immortal!
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Oh, those women! They nurse and cuddle their presentiments, and make darlings of their ugliest thoughts.
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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.
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If thou hast never been a fool, be sure thou wilt never be a wise man.
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Hint at the existence of wickedness in a light, easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody's fine feelings may be offended.
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We should pay as much reverence to youth as we should to age; there are points in which you young folks are altogether our superiors: and I can't help constantly crying out to persons of my own years, when busied about their young people--leave them alone; don't be always meddling with their affairs, which they can manage for themselves; don't be always insisting upon managing their boats, and putting your oars in the water with theirs.
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There are other books in a man's library besides Ovid, and after dawdling ever so long at a woman's knee, one day he gets up and is free. We have all been there; we have all had the fever--the strongest and the smallest, from Samson, Hercules, Rinaldo, downward: but it burns out, and you get well.
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Almost all women will give a sympathizing hearing to men who are in love. Be they ever so old, they grow young again with that conversation, and renew their own early times.