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Oh, Vanity of vanities! How wayward the decrees of Fate are How very weak the very wise, How very small the very great are!
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
Small
Wayward
Great
Vanities
Decrees
Decree
Vanity
Fate
Weak
Wise
More quotes by William Makepeace Thackeray
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
All amusements to which virtuous women are not admitted, are, rely upon it, deleterious in their nature.
William Makepeace Thackeray
The great moments of life are but moments like the others. Your doom is spoken in a word or two. A single look from the eyes a mere pressure of the hand, may decide it or of the lip,s though they cannot speak.
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
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
When you look at me, when you think of me, I am in paradise.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Which of us that is thirty years old has not had its Pompeii? Deep under ashes lies the life of youth--the careless sport, the pleasure and the passion, the darling joy.
William Makepeace Thackeray
If fathers are sometimes sulky at the appearance of the destined son-in-law, is it not a fact that mothers become sentimental and, as it were, love their own loves over again.
William Makepeace Thackeray
I will bring order from chaos and light from darkness.
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
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
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
People hate as they love, unreasonably.
William Makepeace Thackeray
That acknowledgment of weakness which we make in imploring to be relieved from hunger and from temptation is surely wisely put in our daily prayer. Think of it, you who are rich, and take heed how you turn a beggar away.
William Makepeace Thackeray
If you will fling yourself under the wheels, Juggernaut will go over you depend upon it.
William Makepeace Thackeray
As nature made every man with a nose and eyes of his own, she gave him a character of his own, too and yet we, O foolish race! must try our very best to ape some one or two of our neighbors, whose ideas fit us no more than their breeches!
William Makepeace Thackeray
To be beautiful is enough! if a woman can do that well who should demand more from her? You don't want a rose to sing.
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
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
There is a certain sort of man whose doom in the world is disappointment, who excels in it, and whose luckless triumphs in his meek career of life, I have often thought, must be regarded by the kind eyes above with as much favor as the splendid successes and achievements of coarser and more prosperous men.
William Makepeace Thackeray
