William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes
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Kindness is very indigestible. It disagrees with very proud stomachs.
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It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.
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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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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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If there is no love more in yonder heart, it is but a corpse unburied.
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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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I suppose as long as novels last, and authors aim at interesting their public, there must always be in the story a virtuous and gallant hero; a wicked monster, his opposite; and a pretty girl, who finds a champion. Bravery and virtue conquer beauty; and vice, after seeming to triumph through a certain number of pages, is sure to be discomfited in the last volume, when justice overtakes him, and honest folks come by their own.
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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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It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England.
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Alas! we are the sport of destiny.
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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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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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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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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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Pray God, keep us simple.
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It is comparatively easy to leave a mistress, but very hard to be left by one.
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A person can't help their birth.
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Humor is wit and love.
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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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Taste is something quite different from fashion, superior to fashion.
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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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The play is done; the curtain drops, Slow falling to the prompter's bell A moment yet the actor stops And looks around to say farewell.
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If thou hast never been a fool, be sure thou wilt never be a wise man.
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Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated.