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Benevolence and feeling ennoble the most trifling actions.

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
Ennoble
Trifling
Benevolence
Actions
Feeling
Action
Feelings

More quotes by William Makepeace Thackeray

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Might I give counsel to any man, I would say to him, try to frequent the company of your betters. In books and in life, that is the most wholesome society learn to admire rightly the great pleasure of life is that. Note what great men admire.
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Novelty has charms that our minds can hardly withstand.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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Under the magnetism of friendship the modest man becomes bold the shy, confident the lazy, active and the impetuous, prudent and peaceful.
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Perhaps all early love affairs ought to be strangled or drowned, like so many blind kittens.
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Come forward, some great marshal, and organize equality in society, and your rod shall swallow up all the juggling old court gold-sticks
William Makepeace Thackeray
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Life is a mirror: if you frown at it, it frowns back if you smile, it returns the greeting.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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Werther had a love for Charlotte Such as words could never utter Would you know how first he met her? She was cutting bread and butter.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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The little cares, fears, tears, timid misgivings, sleepless fancies of I don't know how many days and nights, were forgotten under one moment's influence of that familiar, irresistible smile.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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Who has not remarked the readiness with which the closest of friends and honestest of men suspect and accuse each other of cheating when they fall out on money matters? Everybody does it. Everybody is right, I suppose, and the world is a rogue.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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Choose a good disagreeable friend, if you be wise--a surly, steady, economical, rigid fellow.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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The best of women are hypocrites.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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A lady who sets her heart upon a lad in uniform must prepare to change lovers pretty quickly, or her life will be but a sad one.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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Young ladies may have been crossed in love, and have had their sufferings, their frantic moments of grief and tears, their wakeful nights, and so forth but it is only in very sentimental novels that people occupy themselves perpetually with that passion, and I believe what are called broken hearts are a very rare article indeed.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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A crow, who had flown away with a cheese from a dairy window, sate perched on a tree looking down at a great big frog in a pool underneath him.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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For my part, I believe that remorse is the least active of all a man's moral senses,--the very easiest to be deadened when wakened, and in some never wakened at all.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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The great quality of Dulness is to be unalterably contented with itself.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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It was in the reign of George II. that the above-named personages lived and quarrelled good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now
William Makepeace Thackeray
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We can't all be lions in this world. There must be some lambs, harmless, kindly, gregarious creatures for eating and shearing.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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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