William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes
It is from the level of calamities, not that of every-day life, that we learn impressive and useful lessons.
Sir, Respect Your Dinner: idolize it, enjoy it properly. You will be many hours in the week, many weeks in the year, and many years in your life happier if you do.
Ah me! we wound where we never intended to strike; we create anger where we never meant harm; and these thoughts are the thorns in our cushion. - William Makepeace Thackeray
Werther had a love for Charlotte Such as words could never utter; Would you know how first he met her? She was cutting bread and butter.
Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?-Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
Not only is the world informed of everything about you, but of a great deal more.
There is no man that can teach us to be gentlemen better than Joseph Addison.
If you had told Sycorax that her son Caliban was as handsome as Apollo, she would have been pleased, witch as she was.
Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
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?
The ladies--Heaven bless them!--are, as a general rule, coquettes from babyhood upwards.
The book of female logic is blotted all over with tears, and Justice in their courts is forever in a passion.
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.
The affection of young ladies is of as rapid growth as Jack's beanstalk, and reaches up to the sky in a night.
Oh, those women! They nurse and cuddle their presentiments, and make darlings of their ugliest thoughts.
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.
Charming Alnaschar visions! it is the happy privilege of youth to construct you.
The death of a child occasions a passion of grief and frantic tears, such as your end, brother reader, will never inspire.
If you will fling yourself under the wheels, Juggernaut will go over you; depend upon it.
Ah! gracious Heaven gives us eyes to see our own wrong, however dim age may make them; and knees not too stiff to kneel, in spite of years, cramp, and rheumatism.
The tallest and the smallest among us are so alike diminutive and pitifully base, it is a meanness to calculate the difference.
One tires of a page of which every sentence sparkles with points, of a sentimentalist who is always pumping the tears from his eyes or your own.
Come forward, some great marshal, and organize equality in society, and your rod shall swallow up all the juggling old court gold-sticks
As if the ray which travels from the sun would reach me sooner than the man who blacks my boots.
A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES.
The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.
Dare and the world always yields; or if it beats you sometimes, dare it again and it will succumb.
Hint at the existence of wickedness in a light, easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody's fine feelings may be offended.
Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions.
When a mother, as fond mothers will; vows that she knows every thought in her daughter's heart, I think she pretends to know a great deal too much.
What money is better bestowed than that of a schoolboy's tip? How the kindness is recalled by the recipient in after days! It blesses him that gives and him that takes.
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?
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.
What is a gentleman? It is to be honest, to be gentle, to be generous, to be brave, to be wise; and possessed of all these qualities to exercise them in the most graceful manner.
When I say that I know women, I mean I know that I don't know them. Every single woman I ever knew is a puzzle to me, as, I have no doubt, she is to herself.
To be beautiful is enough! if a woman can do that well who should demand more from her? You don't want a rose to sing.
We can't all be lions in this world. There must be some lambs, harmless, kindly, gregarious creatures for eating and shearing.
One of the greatest of a great man's qualities is success; 't is the result of all the others; 't is a latent power in him which compels the favor of the gods, and subjugates fortune.