William Makepeace Thackeray
82 quotes
Biography
"It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit."
"Life is a mirror: if you frown at it, it frowns back; if you smile, it returns the greeting."
"Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society."
"To love and win is the best thing.To love and lose, the next best."
"Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?"
"There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write."
"Profoundly grateful, and as if I had swallowed a small baby. … Why, they are perfect beasts of oysters!"
"She looks so haughty that I should have thought her a princess at the very least, with a pedigree reaching as far back as the Deluge. But this lady was no better born than many other ladies who give themselves airs; and all sensible people laughed at her absurd pretensions."
"Except for the young or very happy, I can't say I am sorry for any one who dies."
"I should like to see before I die, and think of it daily more and more, the commencement of Jesus Christ's christianism in the world, where I am sure people may be made a hundred times happier than by its present forms, Judaism, ascenticism, Bullarism."
"A lady who sets her heart upon a lad in uniform must prepare to change lovers pretty quickly, or her life will be but a sad one."
"The unambitious sluggard pretends that the eminence is not worth attaining, declines altogether the struggle, and calls himself a philosopher. I say he is a poor-spirited coward."
"Let the man who has to make his fortune in life remember this maxim. Attacking is his only secret. Dare, and the world always yields: or, if it beat you sometimes, dare again, and it will succumb."
"Good humour may be said to be one of the very best articles of dress one can wear in society."
"I set it down as a maxim that it is good for a man to live where he can meet his betters, intellectual and social."
"Let us be very gentle with our neighbours' failings; and forgive our friends their debts, as we hope ourselves to be forgiven."
"When I say 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."
"Stupid people, people who do not know how to laugh, are always pompous and self-conceited."
"Time passes—Time the consoler—Time the anodyne—Time the grey calm satirist, whose sad smile seems to say, Look, O man, at the vanity of the objects you pursue, and of yourself who pursue them!"
"Society having ordained certain customs, men are bound to obey the law of society, and conform to its harmless orders."
"He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob."
"It is impossible, in our condition of society, not to be sometimes a Snob."
"If you will fling yourself under the wheels, will go over you, depend upon it."
"That which we call a Snob, by any other name would still be Snobbish."
"Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life of the time; of the manners, the movement, the dress, the pleasures, the laughter, the ridicules of society—the old times live again, and I travel in the old country of England. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?"