400 Quotes by 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?

Pray, dear madam, another glass; it is Christmas time, it will do you no harm.

Oh, my young friends, how delightful is the beginning of a love-business, and how undignified, sometimes, the end!

Frequent the company of your betters.

Successful people aren't born that way. They become successful by establishing the habit of doing things unsuccessful people don't like to do. The successful people don't always like these things themselves; they just get on and do them.

Fairy roses, fairy rings, turn out sometimes troublesome things.

I set it down as a maxim, that it is good for a man to live where he can meet his betters, intellectual and social.

Learn to admire rightly; the great pleasure of life is that. Note what the great men admired; they admired great things; narrow spirits admire basely, and worship meanly.

What is it to be a gentleman? Is it to be honest, to be gentle, to be generous, to be brave, to be wise, and, possessing all these qualities, to exercise them in the most graceful outward manner? Ought a gentleman to be a loyal son, a true husband, an honest father? Ought his life to be decent, his bills to be paid, his taste to be high and elegant, his aims in life lofty and noble?