William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes (1811-1863)

“As the gambler said of his dice, to love and win is the best thing, to love and lose is the next best.”

“On deck beneath the awning, I dozing lay and yawning; It was the gray of dawning, Ere yet the Sun arose; And above the funnel's roaring, And the fitful wind's deploring, I heard the cabin snoring With universal noise.”

“Since the days of Adam, there has been hardly a mischief done in this world but a woman has been at the bottom of it.”

“As fierce a beak and talon as ever struck — as strong a wing as ever beat, belong to Swift. [...] One can gaze, and not without awe and pity, at the lonely eagle chained behind the bars [...] An immense genius: an awful downfall and ruin. So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling.”

“Your husband ruined all my prospects in life; he did all my Latin verses for me and I lost all opportunities for self-improvement.”

“Mr Congreve... would make many brilliant hits – half a dozen in a night sometimes – but like sharpshooters, when they had fired their shot they were obliged to retire under cover till their pieces were loaded again.”

“Hogarth's honesty of purpose was as conspicuous in an earlier time, and we fancy that Gillray would have been far more successful and more powerful but for that unhappy bribe, which tuned the whole course of his humour into an unnatural channel.”

“[T]ake at hazard any three pages of the Essays or History; and, glimmering below the stream of the narrative, as it were, you, an average reader, see one, two, three, a half score of allusions to other historic facts, characters, literature, poetry, with which you are acquainted. Why is this epithet used? Whence is that simile drawn? How does he manage, in two or three words, to paint an individual, or to indicate a landscape? Your neighbour, who has his reading, and his little stock of literature stowed away in his mind, shall detect more points, allusions, happy touches, indicating not only the prodigious memory and vast learning of this master, but the wonderful industry, the honest, humble previous toil of this great scholar. He reads twenty books to write a sentence; he travels a hundred miles to make a line of description.”

“He had many fine qualities, no guile or malice against any mortal; a big mass of a soul, but not strong in proportion; a beautiful vein of genius lay struggling about in him. Nobody in our day wrote, I should say, with such perfection of style. I predict of his books very much as you do. Poor Thackeray!—adieu! adieu!”

“Thackeray is everybody's past — is everybody's youth. Forgotten friends flit about the passages of dreamy colleges and unremembered clubs; we hear fragments of unfinished conversations, we see faces without names for an instant, fixed forever in some trivial grimace: we smell the strong smell of social cliques now quite incongruous to us; and there stir in all the little rooms at once the hundred ghosts of oneself.”

“Thackeray's Philip, which I thought excellent, an exquisite combination of pathos and irony and genuine comedy. He is worlds beyond Dickens in the power of direct and accurate observation.”

“Over and outside his fancy, which was the gift which made him so remarkable,—a certain feminine softness was the most remarkable trait about him. To give some immediate pleasure was the great delight of his life,—a sovereign to a schoolboy, gloves to a girl, a dinner to a man, a compliment to a woman. His charity was overflowing. His generosity excessive... Such is my idea of the man whom many call a cynic, but whom I regard as one of the most soft-hearted of human beings, sweet as Charity itself, who went about the world dropping pearls, doing good, and never wilfully inflicting a wound.”