Top 294 Quotes & Sayings by William Makepeace Thackeray - Page 3

The Pall Mall Gazette is written by gentlemen for gentlemen.

We pass by common objects or persons without noticing them; but the keen eye detects and notes types everywhere and among all classes.

As fits the holy Christmas birth, Be this, good friends, our carol still Be peace on earth, be peace on earth, To men of gentle will.

To forego even ambition when the end is gained - who can say this is not greatness?

If fun is good, truth is still better, and love best of all.

Is beauty beautiful, or is it only our eyes that make it so?

A pair of bright eyes with a dozen glances suffice to subdue a man; to enslave him, and enflame him; to make him even forget; they dazzle him so that the past becomes straightway dim to him; and he so prizes them that he would give all his life to possess 'em.

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.

If you take temptations into account, who is to say that he is better than his neighbor?

The world is full of love and pity, I say. Had there been less suffering, there would have been less kindness.

Those we love can but walk down to the pier with us - the voyage we must make alone.

We are most of us very lonely in this world; you who have any who love you, cling to them and thank God.

Next to eating good dinners, a healthy man with a benevolent turn of mind, must like, I think, to read about them.

To describe love-making is immoral and immodest; you know it is. To describe it as it really is, or would appear to you and me as lookers-on, would be to describe the most dreary farce, to chronicle the most tautological twaddle. To take note of sighs, hand-squeezes, looks at the moon, and so forth--does this business become our dignity as historians? Come away from those foolish young people--they don't want us; and dreary as their farce is, and tautological as their twaddle, you may be sure it amuses them, and that they are happy enough without us.

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.

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?

Alas! we are the sport of destiny.

Malice is of the boomerang character, and is apt to turn upon the projector.

Diffidence is a sort of false modesty.

It is comparatively easy to leave a mistress, but very hard to be left by one.

The best of women are hypocrites.

True love is better than glory.

A man is seldom more manly than when he is what you call unmanned,--the source of his emotion is championship, pity, and courage; the instinctive desire to cherish those who are innocent and unhappy, and defend those who are tender and weak.

There is no man that can teach us to be gentlemen better than Joseph Addison.

Presently, we were aware of an odour gradually coming towards us, something musky, fiery, savoury, mysterious, - a hot drowsy smell, that lulls the senses, and yet enflames them, - the truffles were coming.

A gentleman, is a rarer thing than some of us think for. Which of us can point out many such in his circle--men whose aims are generous, whose truth is constant and elevated; who can look the world honestly in the face, with an equal manly sympathy for the great and the small? We all know a hundred whose coats are well made, and a score who have excellent manners; but of gentlemen how many? Let us take a little scrap of paper, and each make out his list.

What stories are new? All types of all characters march through all fables.

Lucky he who has been educated to bear his fate, whatsoever it may be, by an early example of uprightness, and a childish training in honor.

If dying, I yet live in a tender heart or two; nor am I lost and hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me.

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.

When a man is in love with one woman in a family, it is astonishing how fond he becomes of every person connected with it.

A snob is that man or woman who is always pretending to be something better--especially richer or more fashionable--than he is.

Are not there little chapters in everybody's life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?

If a man's character is to be abused, say what you will, there's nobody like a relative to do the business.

Not only is the world informed of everything about you, but of a great deal more.

What is wanted for the nonce is, that folks should be as agreeable as possible in conversation and demeanor; so that good humor may be said to be one of the very best articles of dress one can wear in societ.

if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and trameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably!

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.

That acknowledgment of weakness which we make in imploring to be relieved from hunger and from temptation is surely wisely put in our daily prayer. Think of it, you who are rich, and take heed how you turn a beggar away.

Everybody in Vanity Fair must have remarked how well those live who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt; how they deny themselves nothing; how jolly and easy they are in their minds.

Perhaps there is no greater test of a man's regularity and easiness of conscience than his readiness to face the postman. Blessed is he who is made happy by the sound of a rat-tat! The good are eager for it; but the naughty tremble at the sound thereof.

Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.

Next to the very young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

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.

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.

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.

Our measure of rewards and punishments is most partial and incomplete, absurdly inadequate, utterly worldly; and we wish to continue it into the next world. Into that next and awful world we strive to pursue men, and send after them our impotent paltry verdicts of condemnation or acquittal. We set up our paltry little rod to measure heaven immeasurable.

If success is rare and slow, everybody knows how quick and easy ruin is.

There's a great power of imagination about these little creatures, and a creative fancy and belief that is very curious to watch . . . I am sure that horrid matter-of-fact child-rearers . . . do away with the child's most beautiful privilege. I am determined that Anny shall have a very extensive and instructive store of learning in Tom Thumbs, Jack-the-Giant-Killers, etc.

Humor is the mistress of tears.

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?

It was in the reign of George II. that the above-named personages lived and quarrelled ; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now

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?

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.

Tis not the dying for a faith that's so hard... 'Tis the living up to it that's difficult.

She lived in her past life — every letter seemed to recall some circumstance of it. How well she remembered them all! His looks and tones, his dress, what he said and how — these relics and remembrances of dead affection were all that were left her in the world.

As nature made every man with a nose and eyes of his own, she gave him a character of his own, too; and yet we, O foolish race! must try our very best to ape some one or two of our neighbors, whose ideas fit us no more than their breeches!

Time passes, Time the consoler, Time the anodyne.

When one fib becomes due as it were, you must forge another to take up the old acceptance; and so the stock of your lies in circulation inevitably multiplies, and the danger of detection increases every day.

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.