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If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
William Makepeace Thackeray
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William Makepeace Thackeray
Age: 52 †
Born: 1811
Born: July 18
Died: 1863
Died: December 24
Novelist
Prosaist
Writer
Calcutta
William Makepeace Thackeray
George Fitz-Boodle
Many
Secret
Author
Writing
Reading
Tales
Insipid
Would
Story
Dull
Volumes
Interesting
Private
Noted
History
Reader
Alongside
Stories
Thoughts
Excite
Become
Books
Meanings
Book
Written
Volume
More quotes by William Makepeace Thackeray
An immense percentage of snobs, I believe, is to be found in every rank of this mortal life.
William Makepeace Thackeray
To forego even ambition when the end is gained - who can say this is not greatness?
William Makepeace Thackeray
When a mother, as fond mothers will vows that she knows every thought in her daughter's heart, I think she pretends to know a great deal too much.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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
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
If dying, I yet live in a tender heart or two nor am I lost and hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Do not be in a hurry to succeed. What would you have to live for afterwards? Better make the horizon your goal it will always be ahead of you.
William Makepeace Thackeray
As an occupation in declining years, I declare I think saving is useful, amusing and not unbecoming. It must be a perpetual amusement. It is a game that can be played by day, by night, at home and abroad, and at which you must win in the long run. . . . What an interest it imparts to life!.
William Makepeace Thackeray
I would rather make my name than inherit it.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Learn to admire rightly the great pleasure of life is that. Note what the great men admired they admired great things narrow spirits admire basely, and worship meanly.
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
Be it remembered that man subsists upon the air more than upon his meat and drink but no one can exist for an hour without a copious supply of air. The atmosphere which some breathe is contaminated and adulterated, and with its vital principles so diminished that it cannot fully decarbonize the blood, nor fully excite the nervous system.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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
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 planted it, so deal with your compliments through life. An acorn costs nothing, but it may spread into a prodigious timber.
William Makepeace Thackeray
If you take temptations into account, who is to say that he is better than his neighbor?
William Makepeace Thackeray
For his part, every beauty of art or nature made him thankful as well as happy, and that the pleasure to be had in listening to fine music, as in looking at the stars in the sky, or at a beautiful landscape or picture, was a benefit for which we might thank Heaven as sincerely as for any other worldly blessing.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Oh, brother wearers of motley, are there not moments when one grows sick of grinning and trembling and the jingling of cap and bells?
William Makepeace Thackeray
It is best to love wisely, no doubt but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.
William Makepeace Thackeray
The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Never marry with the expectation of changing a person.
William Makepeace Thackeray
