William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes - Page 5

Every man ought to be in love a few times in his life, and to have a smart attack of the fever. You are better for it when it is over: the better for your misfortune, if you endure it with a manly heart; how much the better for success, if you win it and a good wife into the bargain!

All is vanity, look you; and so the preacher is vanity too.

The best of women are hypocrites.

An immense percentage of snobs, I believe, is to be found in every rank of this mortal life.

As an occupation in declining years, I declare I think saving is useful, amusing and not unbecoming. It must be a perpetual amusement. It is a game that can be played by day, by night, at home and abroad, and at which you must win in the long run. . . . What an interest it imparts to life!.

When I walk with you I feel as if I had a flower in my buttonhole.

If people only made prudent marriages, what a stop to population there would be!

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.

'Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

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.

Oh, Vanity of vanities! How wayward the decrees of Fate are; How very weak the very wise, How very small the very great are!

Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions.

It is an awful thing to get a glimpse, as one sometimes does, when the time is past, of some little, little wheel which works the whole mighty machinery of fate, and see how our destinies turn on a minute's delay or advance.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

All amusements to which virtuous women are not admitted, are, rely upon it, deleterious in their nature.

Almost all women will give a sympathizing hearing to men who are in love. Be they ever so old, they grow young again with that conversation, and renew their own early times.

You, who are ashamed of your poverty, and blush for your calling, are a snob; as are you who boast of your wealth.

Oh, my young friends, how delightful is the beginning of a love-business, and how undignified, sometimes, the end!

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.

You read the past in some old faces.