William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes

We are most of us very lonely in the world. You who have any who love you, cling to them, and thank God.

All is vanity, nothing is fair.

How hard it is to make an Englishman acknowledge that he is happy!

As the gambler said of his dice, to love and win is the best thing, to love and lose is the next best.

...but think how mysterious and often unaccountable it is — that lottery of life which gives to this man the purple and fine linen, and sends to the other rags for garments and dogs for comforters.

The best of women (I have heard my grandmother say) are hypocrites. We don't know how much they hide from us: how watchful they are when they seem most artless and confidential: how often those frank smiles, which they wear so easily, are traps to cajole or elude or disarm-I don't mean in your mere coquettes, but your domestic models, and paragons of female virtue. Who has not seem a woman hide the dulness of a stupid husband or coax the fury of a savage one? We accept this amiable slavishness, and praise a woman for it; we call this pretty treachery truth. A good housewife is of necessity a humbug.

She lived in her past life- these relics and remembrances of dead affection were all that was left her in the world.

It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all. Some of us can't: and are proud of our impotence, too.

A gentleman sitting in spectacles before an old ledger, and writing down pitiful remembrances of his own condition, is a quaint and ridiculous object.

I suppose as long as novels last and authors aim at interesting their public, there must always be in the story a virtuous and gallant hero, a wicked monster his opposite, and a pretty girl who finds a champion; bravery and virtue conquer beauty: and vice, after seeming to triumph through a certain number of pages, is sure to be discomfited in the last volume, when justice overtakes him and honest folks come by their own.

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

By humbly and frankly acknowledging yourself to be in the wrong, there is no knowing, my son, what good you may do. I knew once a gentleman and very worthy practitioner in Vanity Fair, who used to do little wrongs to his neighbours on purpose, and in order to apologise for them in an open and manly way afterwards — and what ensued? My friend Crocky Doyle was liked everywhere, and deemed to be rather impetuous — but the honestest fellow.

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.

He went to the deuce for a woman. There must be good in a man who will do that.

Although I enter not, Yet round about the spot Ofttimes I hover, And near the sacred gate, With longing eyes I wait, Expectant of her.