William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes
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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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Society having ordained certain customs, men are bound to obey the law of society, and conform to its harmless orders.
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Dinner was made for eating, not for talking.
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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.
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It seems to me one cannot sit down in that place [the Round Reading room of the British Museum] without a heart full of grateful reverence. I own to have said my grace at the table, and to have thanked Heaven for my English birthright, freely to partake of these beautiful books, and speak the truth I find there.
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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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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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Successful people aren't born that way. They become successful by establishing the habit of doing things unsuccessful people don't like to do. The successful people don't always like these things themselves; they just get on and do them.
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If thou hast never been a fool, be sure thou wilt never be a wise man.
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A person can't help their birth.
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Alas! we are the sport of destiny.
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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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We who have lived before railways were made belong to another world. It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and then! Then was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armor, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue, and so forth -- all these belong to the old period. But your railroad starts the new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one. We who lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.
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Kindness is very indigestible. It disagrees with very proud stomachs.
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It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England.
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Learn to admire rightly; the great pleasure of life is that. Note what the great men admired; they admired great things; narrow spirits admire basely, and worship meanly.
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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?
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Humor is wit and love.
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Which of us that is thirty years old has not had its Pompeii? Deep under ashes lies the life of youth--the careless sport, the pleasure and the passion, the darling joy.
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At that comfortable tavern on Pontchartrain we had a bouillabaisse than which a better was never eaten at Marseilles; and not the least headache in the morning, I give you my word; on the contrary, you only wake with a sweet refreshing thirst for claret and water.
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So they pass away: friends, kindred, the dearest-loved, grown people, aged, infants. As we go on the down-hill journey, the mile-stones are grave-stones, and on each more and more names are written; unless haply you live beyond man's common age, when friends have dropped off, and, tottering, and feeble, and unpitied, you reach the terminus alone.
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It is comparatively easy to leave a mistress, but very hard to be left by one.
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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.