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Oh, brother wearers of motley, are there not moments when one grows sick of grinning and trembling and the jingling of cap and bells?

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
Brother
Grows
Jingling
Moments
Motley
Grinning
Caps
Trembling
Bells
Sick

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Who feels injustice, who shrinks before a slight, who has a sense of wrong so acute, and so glowing a gratitude for kindness, as a generous boy?
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The ladies--Heaven bless them!--are, as a general rule, coquettes from babyhood upwards.
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Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you.
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One of the greatest of a great man's qualities is success 't is the result of all the others 't is a latent power in him which compels the favor of the gods, and subjugates fortune.
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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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Time passes, Time the consoler, Time the anodyne.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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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?
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Vanity is often the unseen spur.
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It is from the level of calamities, not that of every-day life, that we learn impressive and useful lessons.
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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.
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A snob is that man or woman who is always pretending to be something better--especially richer or more fashionable--than he is.
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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
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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.
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If you will fling yourself under the wheels, Juggernaut will go over you depend upon it.
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Dinner was made for eating, not for talking.
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In effective womanly beauty form is more than face, and manner more than either.
William Makepeace Thackeray
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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.
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I never was much of an oyster eater, nor can I relish them 'in naturalibus' as some do, but require a quantity of sauces, lemons, cayenne peppers, bread and butter, and so forth, to render them palatable.
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Bravery never goes out of fashion.
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Our great thoughts, our great affections, the truths of our life, never leave us. Surely they can not separate from our consciousness, shall follow it whithersoever that shall go, and are of their nature divine and immortal.
William Makepeace Thackeray