Top 200 William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “A snob is that man or woman who is always pretending to be something better – especially richer or more fashionable – than he is.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

152. “Come forward, some great marshal, and organize equality in society, and your rod shall swallow up all the juggling old court gold-sticks.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

153. “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

154. “A man is seldom more manly than when he is what you call unmanned, – the source of his emotion is championship, pity, and courage; the instinctive desire to cherish those who are innocent and unhappy, and defend those who are tender and weak.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

155. “Kindness is very indigestible. It disagrees with proud stomachs.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

156. “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.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

157. “He had placed himself at her feet so long that the poor little woman had been accustomed to trample upon him. She didn’t wish to marry him, but she wished to keep him. She wished to give him nothing, but that he should give her all. It is a bargain not unfrequently levied in love.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

158. “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

159. “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

160. “Certain corpuscles, denominated Christmas Books, with the ostensible intention of swelling the tide of exhilaration, or other expansive emotions, incident upon the exodus of the old and the inauguration of the New Year.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

161. “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.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

162. “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!”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

163. “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

164. “Happy! Who is happy? Was there not a serpent in Paradise itself? And if Eve had been perfectly happy beforehand, would she have listened to the tempter?”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

165. “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

166. “It’s a great comfort to some people to groan over their imaginary ills.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

167. “What man’s life is not overtaken by one or more of those tornadoes that send us out of the course, and fling us on rocks to shelter as best we may?”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

168. “The tallest and the smallest among us are so alike diminutive and pitifully base, it is a meanness to calculate the difference.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

169. “It is an awful thing to get a glimpse, as one sometimes does, when the time is past, of some little, little wheel which works the whole mighty machinery of fate, and see how our destinies turn on a minute’s delay or advance.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

170. “He who meanly admires a mean thing is a snob – perhaps that is a safe definition of the character.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

171. “Nature has written a letter of credit upon some men’s faces that is honored wherever presented. You cannot help trusting such men. Their very presence gives confidence. There is promise to pay in their faces which gives confidence and you prefer it to another man’s endorsement. Character is credit.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

172. “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.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

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

— William Makepeace Thackeray

174. “An intelligent wife can make her home, in spite of exigencies, pretty much what she pleases.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

175. “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.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

176. “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

177. “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.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

178. “Oh, my young friends, how delightful is the beginning of a love-business, and how undignified, sometimes, the end!”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

179. “In effective womanly beauty form is more than face, and manner more than either.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

180. “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?”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

181. “Sure, occasion is the father of most that is good in us.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

182. “Ho, pretty page, with the dimpled chin That never has known the barber’s shear, All your wish is woman to win, This is the way that boys begin. Wait till you come to Forty Year.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

183. “You, who are ashamed of your poverty, and blush for your calling, are a snob; as are you who boast of your wealth.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

184. “How hard it is to make an Englishman acknowledge that he is happy! Pendennis. Book ii. Chap. xxxi.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

185. “Lucky he who has been educated to bear his fate, whatsoever it may be, by an early example of uprightness, and a childish training in honor.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

186. “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

187. “Never marry with the expectation of changing a person.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

188. “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.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

189. “Ah! gracious Heaven gives us eyes to see our own wrong, however dim age may make them; and knees not too stiff to kneel, in spite of years, cramp, and rheumatism.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

190. “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.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

191. “It is comparatively easy to leave a mistress, but very hard to be left by one.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

192. “When a man is in love with one woman in a family, it is astonishing how fond he becomes of every person connected with it.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

193. “It is all very well for you, who have probably never seen any spiritual manifestations, to talk as you do; but if you had seen what I have witnessed you would hold a different opinion.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

194. “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.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

195. “Choose a good disagreeable friend, if you be wise – a surly, steady, economical, rigid fellow.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

196. “One of the great conditions of anger and hatred is, that you must tell and believe lies against the hated object, in order, as we said, to be consistent.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

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

— William Makepeace Thackeray

198. “Praise everybody, I say to such: never be squeamish, but speak out your compliment both point-blank in a man’s face, and behind his back, when you know there is a reasonable chance of his hearing it again. 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 popped it in; so deal with your compliments through life. An acorn costs nothing; but it may sprout into a prodigious bit of timber.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

199. “The ladies – Heaven bless them! – are, as a general rule, coquettes from babyhood upwards.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

200. “Women like not only to conquer, but to be conquered.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray