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Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?-Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
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
Children
Shut
World
Boxes
Satisfied
Played
Happy
Desire
Come
Play
Puppets
More quotes by William Makepeace Thackeray
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.
William Makepeace Thackeray
A good woman is the loveliest flower that blooms under heaven and we look with love and wonder upon its silent grace, its pure fragrance, its delicate bloom of beauty.
William Makepeace Thackeray
To be thought rich is as good as to be rich.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Sure, occasion is the father of most that is good in us.
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
He that has ears to hear, let him stuff them with cotton.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Perhaps all early love affairs ought to be strangled or drowned, like so many blind kittens.
William Makepeace Thackeray
We know that Heaven chastens those whom it loves best being pleased by repeated trials, to make . . . pure spirits more pure.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Who has not seen how women bully women? What tortures have men to endure compared to those daily repeated shafts of scorn and cruelty with which poor women are riddled by the tyrants of their sex?
William Makepeace Thackeray
If thou hast never been a fool, be sure thou wilt never be a wise man.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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
The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors.
William Makepeace Thackeray
An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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
It seems to me one cannot sit down in that place [the Round Reading room of the British Museum] without a heart full of grateful reverence. I own to have said my grace at the table, and to have thanked Heaven for my English birthright, freely to partake of these beautiful books, and speak the truth I find there.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Since the days of Adam, there has been hardly a mischief done in this world but a woman has been at the bottom of it.
William Makepeace Thackeray
We have only to change the point of view and the greatest action looks mean.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Next to excellence is the appreciation of it.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Diffidence is a sort of false modesty.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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
