William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes

194 Sourced Quotes

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

William Makepeace Thackeray
If a man has committed wrong in life, I don't know any moralist more anxious to point his errors out to the world than his own relations.

William Makepeace Thackeray
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.

William Makepeace Thackeray
She had not character enough to take to drinking, and moaned about, slip-shod and in curl-papers, all day.

William Makepeace Thackeray
A woman may possess the wisdom and chastity of Minerva, and we give no heed to her, if she has a plain face. What folly will not a pair of bright eyes make pardonable? What dullness may not red lips are sweet accents render pleasant? And 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.

William Makepeace Thackeray
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

William Makepeace Thackeray
It is the ordinary lot of people to have no friends if they themselves care for nobody

William Makepeace Thackeray
To endure is greater than to dare; to tire out hostile fortune; to be daunted by no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it; to go through intrigue spotless; and to forgo even ambition when the end is gained — who can say this is not greatness?

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

William Makepeace Thackeray
Perhaps all early love affairs ought to be strangled or drowned, like so many blind kittens.

William Makepeace Thackeray
A woman with fair opportunities and without a positive hump, may marry whom she likes.

William Makepeace Thackeray
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?

William Makepeace Thackeray
Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?

William Makepeace Thackeray
In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone.

William Makepeace Thackeray
Women like not only to conquer, but to be conquered.

William Makepeace Thackeray
And whenever he spoke (which he did almost always), he took care to produce the very finest and longest words of which the vocabulary gave him the use, rightly judging that it was as cheap to employ a handsome, large, and sonorous epithet, as to use a little stingy one.

William Makepeace Thackeray
To see a young couple loving each other is no wonder; but to see an old couple loving each other is the best sight of all.

William Makepeace Thackeray
At certain periods of life, we live years of emotion in a few weeks, and look back on those times as on great gaps between the old life and the new.

William Makepeace Thackeray
Which of us that is thirty years old has not had its Pompeii? Deep under ashes lies the life of youth--the careless sport, the pleasure and the passion, the darling joy.

William Makepeace Thackeray
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.

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

William Makepeace Thackeray
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

William Makepeace Thackeray
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.

William Makepeace Thackeray
If you had told Sycorax that her son Caliban was as handsome as Apollo, she would have been pleased, witch as she was.

William Makepeace Thackeray
A crow, who had flown away with a cheese from a dairy window, sate perched on a tree looking down at a great big frog in a pool underneath him.

William Makepeace Thackeray
Who has not seen how women bully women? What tortures have men to endure compared to those daily repeated shafts of scorn and cruelty with which poor women are riddled by the tyrants of their sex?

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

William Makepeace Thackeray
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.

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

William Makepeace Thackeray
I have seen no men in life loving their profession so much as painters, except, perhaps, actors, who, when not engaged themselves, always go to the play.

William Makepeace Thackeray