William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Malice is of the boomerang character, and is apt to turn upon the projector.
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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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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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In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone.
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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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Tis not the dying for a faith that's so hard... 'Tis the living up to it that's difficult.
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If thou hast never been a fool, be sure thou wilt never be a wise man.
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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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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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She had not character enough to take to drinking, and moaned about, slip-shod and in curl-papers, all day.
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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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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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Why do they always put mud into coffee on board steamers? Why does the tea generally taste of boiled boots?
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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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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.
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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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As they say in the old legends]Before a man goes to the devil himself, he sends plenty of other souls thither.
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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.