William Makepeace Thackeray Quotations

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.

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

Next to excellence is the appreciation of it.

When you look at me, when you think of me, I am in paradise.

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

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!

The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

A good laugh is sunshine in the house.

An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through.

Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.

It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.

Do not be in a hurry to succeed. What would you have to live for afterwards? Better make the horizon your goal; it will always be ahead of you.

Let a man who has to make his fortune in life remember this maxim: Attacking is the only secret. Dare and the world yields, or if it beats you sometimes, dare it again and you will succeed.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best.

Dinner was made for eating, not for talking.

I would rather make my name than inherit it.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England.

A clever, ugly man every now and then is successful with the ladies, but a handsome fool is irresistible.

It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.

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.

Kindnesses are easily forgotten; but injuries! what worthy man does not keep those in mind?

The book of female logic is blotted all over with tears, and Justice in their courts is forever in a passion.

I never knew whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses.

Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you.

Remember, it's as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.

Except for the young or very happy, I can't say I am sorry for anyone who dies.

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

There are many sham diamonds in this life which pass for real, and vice versa.

People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

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

We should pay as much reverence to youth as we should to age; there are points in which you young folks are altogether our superiors: and I can't help constantly crying out to persons of my own years, when busied about their young people--leave them alone; don't be always meddling with their affairs, which they can manage for themselves; don't be always insisting upon managing their boats, and putting your oars in the water with theirs.

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

Business first; pleasure afterwards.

Those who are gone, you have. Those who departed loving you, love you still; and you love them always. They are not really gone, those dear hearts and true; they are only gone into the next room; and you will presently get up and follow them, and yonder door will close upon you, and you will be no more seen.

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.

What will a man not do when frantic with love? To what baseness will he not demean himself? What pangs will he not make others suffer, so that he may ease his selfish heart?

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.

Love seems to survive life, and to reach beyond it. I think we take it with us past the grave. Do we not still give it to those who have left us? May we not hope that they feel it for us, and that we shall leave it here in one or two fond bosoms, when we also are gone?

Happiest time of youth and life, when love is first spoken and returned; when the dearest eyes are daily shining welcome, and the fondest lips never tire of whispering their sweet secrets; when the parting look that accompanies "Good night!" gives delightful warning of tomorrow.

Pray God, keep us simple.

Women like not only to conquer, but to be conquered.

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

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.

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.

The Pall Mall Gazette is written by gentlemen for gentlemen.

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.

Who does not believe his first passion eternal?

Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish. Alas, the heart hardens as the blood ceases to run. The cold snow strikes down from the head, and checks the glow of feeling. Who wants to survive into old age after abdicating all his faculties one by one, and be sans teeth, sans eyes, sans memory, sans hope, sans sympathy?

Frequent the company of your betters.

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.

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

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.

To our betters eve can reconcile ourselves, if you please--respecting them sincerely, laughing at their jokes, making allowance for their stupidities, meekly suffering their insolence; but we can't pardon our equals going beyond us.

Young ladies may have been crossed in love, and have had their sufferings, their frantic moments of grief and tears, their wakeful nights, and so forth; but it is only in very sentimental novels that people occupy themselves perpetually with that passion, and I believe what are called broken hearts are a very rare article indeed.

Diffidence is a sort of false modesty.

There are other books in a man's library besides Ovid, and after dawdling ever so long at a woman's knee, one day he gets up and is free. We have all been there; we have all had the fever--the strongest and the smallest, from Samson, Hercules, Rinaldo, downward: but it burns out, and you get well.

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.

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.

If fathers are sometimes sulky at the appearance of the destined son-in-law, is it not a fact that mothers become sentimental and, as it were, love their own loves over again.

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!

The ladies--Heaven bless them!--are, as a general rule, coquettes from babyhood upwards.

I want a sofa, as I want a friend, upon which I can repose familiarly. If you can't have intimate terms and freedom with one and the other, they are of no good.

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 death of a child occasions a passion of grief and frantic tears, such as your end, brother reader, will never inspire.

Charming Alnaschar visions! it is the happy privilege of youth to construct you.

If you will fling yourself under the wheels, Juggernaut will go over you; depend upon it.

Benevolence and feeling ennoble the most trifling actions.

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.

When [men] see a pretty woman, and feel the delicious madness of love coming over them, they always stop to calculate her temper, her money, their own money, or suitableness for the married life.... Ha, ha, ha! Let us fool in this way no more. I have been in love forty-three times with all ranks and conditions of women, and would have married every time if they would have let me. How many wives had King Solomon, the wisest of men? And is not that story a warning to us that Love is master of the wisest? It is only fools who defy him.

Sure, love vincit omnia; is immeasurably above all ambition, more precious than wealth, more noble than name. He knows not life who knows not that: he hath not felt the highest faculty of the soul who hath not enjoyed it.

Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, 'To-morrow, success or failure won't matter much; and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.'

We have only to change the point of view and the greatest action looks mean.

If I mayn't tell you what I feel, what is the use of a friend?

Then sing as Martin Luther sang, As Doctor Martin Luther sang, "Who loves not wine, woman and song, He is a fool his whole life long."

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.

The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors.

This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is - A sort of soup or broth, or brew, Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes, That Greenwich never could outdo; Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron, Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace; All these you eat at Terre's tavern, In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.

We know that Heaven chastens those whom it loves best; being pleased by repeated trials, to make . . . pure spirits more pure.

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.

Novelty has charms that our minds can hardly withstand.

The affection of young ladies is of as rapid growth as Jack's beanstalk, and reaches up to the sky in a night.

'No business before breakfast, Glum!' says the King. 'Breakfast first, business next.'

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

Never lose a chance of saying a kind word. As Collingwood never saw a vacant place in his estate but he took an acorn out of his pocket and planted it, so deal with your compliments through life. An acorn costs nothing, but it may spread into a prodigious timber.

Tis hard with respect to Beauty, that its possessor should not have a life enjoyment of it, but be compelled to resign it after, at the most, some forty years lease

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

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.

Who has not remarked the readiness with which the closest of friends and honestest of men suspect and accuse each other of cheating when they fall out on money matters? Everybody does it. Everybody is right, I suppose, and the world is a rogue.

Who was the blundering idiot who said 'fine words butter no parsnips'? Half the parsnips of society are served and rendered palatable with no other sauce.

If love lives through all life; and survives through all sorrow; and remains steadfast with us through all changes; and in all darkness of spirit burns brightly; and, if we die, deplores us for ever, and loves still equally; and exists with the very last gasp and throb of the faithful bosom--whence it passes with the pure soul, beyond death; surely it shall be immortal!

It seems to me one cannot sit down in that place [the Round Reading room of the British Museum] without a heart full of grateful reverence. I own to have said my grace at the table, and to have thanked Heaven for my English birthright, freely to partake of these beautiful books, and speak the truth I find there.

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

Hint at the existence of wickedness in a light, easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody's fine feelings may be offended.

I believe that remorse is the least active of all a man's moral senses.

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 woman, however old, has not the bridal-favours and raiment stowed away, and packed in lavender, in the inmost cupboards of her heart?

He that has ears to hear, let him stuff them with cotton.

Alas! we are the sport of destiny.