William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes

It was over these few worthless papers that she brooded and brooded. She lived in her past life-every letter seemed to recall some circumstance of it. How well she remembered them all! His looks and tones, his dress, what he said and how-these relics and remembrances of dead affection were all that were left her in the world. And the business of her life, was-to watch the corpse of Love.

How lonely we are in the world; how selfish and secret, everybody!

The hidden and awful Wisdom which apportions the destinies of mankind is pleased so to humiliate and cast down the tender, good, and wise; and to set up the selfish, the foolish, or the wicked. Oh, be humble, my brother, in your prosperity! Be gentle with those who are less lucky, if not more deserving. Think, what right have you to be scornful, whose virtue is a deficiency of temptation, whose success may be a chance, whose rank may be an ancestor's accident, whose prosperity is very likely a satire.

He was always thinking of his brother's soul, or of the souls of those who differed with him in opinion: it is a sort of comfort which many of the serious give themselves.

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...

Here’s a 165-year old but still fitting comment on public officials who are so sure they’re right that they’ll drive over a cliff rather than compromise:
“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, Vanity Fair: a Novel without a Hero (1848).

The author’s middle name really was “Makepeace.” As the quote shows, he disliked those who would not.

The best ink for Vanity Fair use would be one that faded utterly in a couple of days, and left the paper clean and blank, so that you might write on it to somebody else.

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.

...the greatest tyrants over women are women.

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

The little cares, fears, tears, timid misgivings, sleepless fancies of I don't know how many days and nights, were forgotten under one moment's influence of that familiar, irresistible smile.

Here is a minute. It may be my love is dead, but here is a minute to kneel over the grave and pray by it.

who can tell me that that calmness itself is not DESPAIR?

if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and trameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably!

Picture to yourself, O fair young reader, a worldly, selfish, graceless, thankless, religionless old woman, writhing in pain and fear, and without her wig. Picture her to yourself, and ere you be old, learn to love and pray.