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Who was the blundering idiot who said 'fine words butter no parsnips'? Half the parsnips of society are served and rendered palatable with no other sauce.
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
Served
Idiot
Fine
Parsnips
Society
Blundering
Half
Palatable
Words
Rendered
Butter
Sauce
More quotes by William Makepeace Thackeray
Taste is something quite different from fashion, superior to fashion.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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
When I say that I know women, I mean I know that I don't know them. Every single woman I ever knew is a puzzle to me, as, I have no doubt, she is to herself.
William Makepeace Thackeray
In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone.
William Makepeace Thackeray
An immense percentage of snobs, I believe, is to be found in every rank of this mortal life.
William Makepeace Thackeray
If there is no love more in yonder heart, it is but a corpse unburied.
William Makepeace Thackeray
What stories are new? All types of all characters march through all fables.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Is beauty beautiful, or is it only our eyes that make it so?
William Makepeace Thackeray
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
Charming Alnaschar visions! it is the happy privilege of youth to construct you.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Perhaps there is no greater test of a man's regularity and easiness of conscience than his readiness to face the postman. Blessed is he who is made happy by the sound of a rat-tat! The good are eager for it but the naughty tremble at the sound thereof.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Never marry with the expectation of changing a person.
William Makepeace Thackeray
What is a gentleman? It is to be honest, to be gentle, to be generous, to be brave, to be wise and possessed of all these qualities to exercise them in the most graceful manner.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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
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
Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them-almost all women a vast number of clever, hardheaded men.
William Makepeace Thackeray
A pair of bright eyes with a dozen glances suffice to subdue a man to enslave him, and enflame him to make him even forget they dazzle him so that the past becomes straightway dim to him and he so prizes them that he would give all his life to possess 'em.
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
If you will fling yourself under the wheels, Juggernaut will go over you depend upon it.
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