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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
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Calcutta
William Makepeace Thackeray
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More quotes by William Makepeace Thackeray
How hard it is to make an Englishman acknowledge that he is happy! Pendennis. Book ii. Chap. xxxi.
William Makepeace Thackeray
The play is done the curtain drops, Slow falling to the prompter's bell A moment yet the actor stops And looks around to say farewell.
William Makepeace Thackeray
What, indeed, does not that word cheerfulness imply? It means a contented spirit, it means a pure heart, it means a kind and loving disposition it means humility and charity it means a generous appreciation of others, and a modest opinion of self.
William Makepeace Thackeray
A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry whom she likes. Only let us be thankful that the darlings are like the beasts of the field, and don't know their own power. They would overcome us entirely if they did.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish. Alas, the heart hardens as the blood ceases to run. The cold snow strikes down from the head, and checks the glow of feeling. Who wants to survive into old age after abdicating all his faculties one by one, and be sans teeth, sans eyes, sans memory, sans hope, sans sympathy?
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
Those who forgets their friends to follow those of a higher status are truly snobs.
William Makepeace Thackeray
If people only made prudent marriages, what a stop to population there would be!
William Makepeace Thackeray
So they pass away: friends, kindred, the dearest-loved, grown people, aged, infants. As we go on the down-hill journey, the mile-stones are grave-stones, and on each more and more names are written unless haply you live beyond man's common age, when friends have dropped off, and, tottering, and feeble, and unpitied, you reach the terminus alone.
William Makepeace Thackeray
How do men feel whose whole lives (and many men's lives are) are lies, schemes, and subterfuges? What sort of company do they keep when they are alone? Daily in life I watch men whose every smile is an artifice, and every wink is an hypocrisy. Doth such a fellow where a mask in his own privacy, and to his own conscience?
William Makepeace Thackeray
There is no man that can teach us to be gentlemen better than Joseph Addison.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life, of the times, of the manners, of the merriment, of the dress, the pleasure, the laughter, the ridicules of society. The old times live again. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?
William Makepeace Thackeray
Are not there little chapters in everybody's life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?
William Makepeace Thackeray
Pray God, keep us simple.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Who does not believe his first passion eternal?
William Makepeace Thackeray
That which we call a snob by any other name would still be snobbish.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Life is a mirror: if you frown at it, it frowns back if you smile, it returns the greeting.
William Makepeace Thackeray
In effective womanly beauty form is more than face, and manner more than either.
William Makepeace Thackeray
When I walk with you I feel as if I had a flower in my buttonhole.
William Makepeace Thackeray
This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is - A sort of soup or broth, or brew, Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes, That Greenwich never could outdo Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron, Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace All these you eat at Terre's tavern, In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.
William Makepeace Thackeray
