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To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best.
William Makepeace Thackeray -
Never lose a chance of saying a kind word.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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Let us be very gentle with our neighbors' failings, and forgive our friends their debts as we hope ourselves to be forgiven.
William Makepeace Thackeray -
He was always thinking of his brother's soul, or of the souls of those who differed with him in opinion: it is a sort of comfort which many of the serious give themselves.
William Makepeace Thackeray -
We love being in love, that's the truth on't. If we had not met Joan, we should have met Kate, and adored her. We know our mistresses are no better than many other women, nor no prettier, nor no wiser, nor no wittier. 'Tis not for these reasons we love a woman, or for any special quality or charm I know of; we might as well demand that a lady should be the tallest woman in the world, like the Shropshire giantess, as that she should be a paragon in any other character, before we began to love her.
William Makepeace Thackeray -
If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
William Makepeace Thackeray -
Life is the soul's nursery.
William Makepeace Thackeray -
Our great thoughts, our great affections, the truths of our life, never leave us. Surely they can not separate from our consciousness, shall follow it whithersoever that shall go, and are of their nature divine and immortal.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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it is the ordinary lot of people to have no friends if they themselves care for nobody
William Makepeace Thackeray -
Next to the very young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.
William Makepeace Thackeray -
Nature has written a letter of credit upon some men's faces that is honored wherever presented. You cannot help trusting such men. Their very presence gives confidence. There is promise to pay in their faces which gives confidence and you prefer it to another man's endorsement. Character is credit.
William Makepeace Thackeray -
A woman may possess the wisdom and chastity of Minerva, and we give no heed to her, if she has a plain face. What folly will not a pair of bright eyes make pardonable? What dullness may not red lips are sweet accents render pleasant? And so, with their usual sense of justice, ladies argue that because a woman is handsome, therefore she is a fool. O ladies, ladies! there are some of you who are neither handsome nor wise.
William Makepeace Thackeray -
What, indeed, does not that word "cheerfulness" imply? It means a contented spirit, it means a pure heart, it means a kind and loving disposition; it means humility and charity; it means a generous appreciation of others, and a modest opinion of self.
William Makepeace Thackeray -
Next to excellence is the appreciation of it.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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You read the past in some old faces.
William Makepeace Thackeray -
The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts; but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?
William Makepeace Thackeray -
Women like not only to conquer, but to be conquered.
William Makepeace Thackeray -
For my part, I believe that remorse is the least active of all a man's moral senses,--the very easiest to be deadened when wakened, and in some never wakened at all.
William Makepeace Thackeray -
Who feels injustice, who shrinks before a slight, who has a sense of wrong so acute, and so glowing a gratitude for kindness, as a generous boy?
William Makepeace Thackeray -
In effective womanly beauty form is more than face, and manner more than either.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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You must not judge hastily or vulgarly of Snobs: to do so shows that you are yourself a Snob.
William Makepeace Thackeray -
If a man has committed wrong in life, I don't know any moralist more anxious to point his errors out to the world than his own relations.
William Makepeace Thackeray -
It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.
William Makepeace Thackeray -
Time passes, Time the consoler, Time the anodyne.
William Makepeace Thackeray