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Happy! Who is happy? Was there not a serpent in Paradise itself? And if Eve had been perfectly happy beforehand, would she have listened to the tempter?
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
Perfectly
Happiness
Happy
Would
Tempter
Beforehand
Serpent
Listened
Paradise
More quotes by William Makepeace Thackeray
Almost all women will give a sympathizing hearing to men who are in love. Be they ever so old, they grow young again with that conversation, and renew their own early times.
William Makepeace Thackeray
It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.
William Makepeace Thackeray
At certain periods of life, we live years of emotion in a few weeks, and look back on those times as on great gaps between the old life and the new.
William Makepeace Thackeray
I have long gone about with a conviction on my mind that I had a work to do-a Work, if you like, with a great W a Purpose to fulfil ... a Great Social Evil to Discover and to Remedy.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Titles are abolished and the American Republic swarms with men claiming and bearing them.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Money has only a different value in the eyes of each.
William Makepeace Thackeray
A good laugh is sunshine in the house.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Perhaps all early love affairs ought to be strangled or drowned, like so many blind kittens.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Who does not believe his first passion eternal?
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
You must not judge hastily or vulgarly of Snobs: to do so shows that you are yourself a Snob.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Though small was your allowance, You saved a little store: And those who save a little, Shall get a plenty more.
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
When a mother, as fond mothers will vows that she knows every thought in her daughter's heart, I think she pretends to know a great deal too much.
William Makepeace Thackeray
All is vanity, nothing is fair.
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
Society having ordained certain customs, men are bound to obey the law of society, and conform to its harmless orders.
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
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
Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life, of the times, of the manners, of the merriment, of the dress, the pleasure, the laughter, the ridicules of society. The old times live again. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?
William Makepeace Thackeray