William Makepeace Thackeray - Vanity Fair (1848)

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

William Makepeace Thackeray
The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.

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
Darkness came down on the field and city: and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.

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

William Makepeace Thackeray
I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.

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

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
Whenever he met a great man he grovelled before him, and my-lorded him as only a free-born Briton can do.

William Makepeace Thackeray
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.

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

William Makepeace Thackeray
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!

William Makepeace Thackeray
Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled.

William Makepeace Thackeray
If there is no love more in yonder heart, it is but a corpse unburied.

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

William Makepeace Thackeray
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?

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

William Makepeace Thackeray
[As they say in the old legends]Before a man goes to the devil himself, he sends plenty of other souls thither.

William Makepeace Thackeray
I knew all along that the prize I had set my life on was not worth the winning.

William Makepeace Thackeray
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.

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

William Makepeace Thackeray
If she did not wish to lead a virtuous life, at least she desired to enjoy a character for virtue.

William Makepeace Thackeray
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.

William Makepeace Thackeray
Oh, those women! They nurse and cuddle their presentiments, and make darlings of their ugliest thoughts.

William Makepeace Thackeray
What a dignity it gives an old lady, that balance at the bankers! How tenderly we look at her faults if she is a relative; what a kind, good-natured old creature we find her!

William Makepeace Thackeray
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.

William Makepeace Thackeray