William Makepeace Thackeray

Life is the soul's nursery.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

The best of women are hypocrites.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

Bad husbands will make bad wives.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

All is vanity, nothing is fair.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

True love is better than glory.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

Never lose a chance of saying a kind word.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

Vanity is often the unseen spur.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

There are many sham diamonds in this life which pass for real, and vice versa.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

What stories are new? All types of all characters march through all fables.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

I believe that remorse is the least active of all a man's moral senses.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

Next to the very young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

In effective womanly beauty form is more than face, and manner more than either.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

“The stiff-backed prig, with his dandified airs and West End swagger.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

“... nobody does anything for nothing. ... it is the ordinary lot of people to have no friends if they themselves care for nobody.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

A lady who sets her heart upon a lad in uniform must prepare to change lovers pretty quickly, or her life will…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

One tires of a page of which every sentence sparkles with points, of a sentimentalist who is always pumping the tears from…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

Oh, those women! They nurse and cuddle their presentiments, and make darlings of their ugliest thoughts.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

The ladies--Heaven bless them!--are, as a general rule, coquettes from babyhood upwards.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

It is from the level of calamities, not that of every-day life, that we learn impressive and useful lessons.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES.

— William Makepeace Thackeray

Who feels injustice, who shrinks before a slight, who has a sense of wrong so acute, and so glowing a gratitude for…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

Every man ought to be in love a few times in his life, and to have a smart attack of the fever.…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

“The game, in fact, and the glory, such as it is, is all his, and the punishment alone falls upon her. Consider…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

She lived in her past life — every letter seemed to recall some circumstance of it. How well she remembered them all!…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

What, indeed, does not that word "cheerfulness" imply? It means a contented spirit, it means a pure heart, it means a kind…

— 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;…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

“But my kind reader will please to remember that this history has “Vanity Fair” for a title, and that Vanity Fair is…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

Our great thoughts, our great affections, the truths of our life, never leave us. Surely they can not separate from our consciousness,…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

Who has not seen how women bully women? What tortures have men to endure compared to those daily repeated shafts of scorn…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

We love being in love, that's the truth on't. If we had not met Joan, we should have met Kate, and adored…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

“O blessed idleness! Divine lazy nymph! Reach me a novel as I lie in my dressing-gown at three o'clock in the afternoon;…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

“Mr. Brock’s account of his adventure in London has given the reader some short notice of his friend, Mr Macshane. Neither the…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

“... I regularly frequent St. George';s, Hanover Square, during the genteel marriage season; and though I have never seen the bridegroom's male…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

“Suppose you are particularly rich and well-to-do, and say on that last day, 'I am very rich; I am tolerably well known;…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

“Every man, however brief or inglorious may have been his academical career, must remember with kindness and tenderness the old university comrades…

— William Makepeace Thackeray

“Mrs. O’Dowd, the good housewife, arrayed in curl papers and a camisole, felt that her duty was to act, and not to…

— William Makepeace Thackeray