William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 – 1863)
English Victorian writer.
Then sing as Martin Luther sang,
As Doctor Martin Luther sang,
“Who loves not wine, woman and song,
He is a fool his whole life long.”
Let the man who has to make his fortune in life remember this maxim. Attacking is his only secret. Dare, and the world always yields: or, if it beat you sometimes, dare again, and it will succumb.
Here was a man who could not spell, and did not care to read — who had the habits and the cunning of a boor: whose aim in life was pettifogging: who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but was sordid and soil; and yet he had rank, and honors, and power, somehow: and was dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state.
'Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.
Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated.
Good humour may be said to be one of the very best articles of dress one can wear in society.
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.
Charlotte, having seen his body
Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well-conducted person,
Went on cutting bread and butter.
Everybody in Vanity Fair must have remarked how well those live who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt; how they deny themselves nothing; how jolly and easy they are in their minds.
Ah! Vanitas vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? — Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
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.
Christmas is here:
Winds whistle shrill,
Icy and chill.
Little care we;
Little we fear
Weather without,
Sheltered about
The Mahogany Tree.
As the gambler said of his dice, to love and win is the best thing, to love and lose is the next best.
The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts: but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?
This I set down as a positive truth. A woman with fair opportunities, and without a positive hump, may marry whom she likes.
The unambitious sluggard pretends that the eminence is not worth attaining, declines altogether the struggle, and calls himself a philosopher. I say he is a poor-spirited coward.
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!
Of the Corporation of the Goosequill — of the Press, my boy, ... of the fourth estate ... There she is — the great engine — she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every quarter of the world — her couriers upon every road. Her officers march along with armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen's cabinets. They are ubiquitous.
Bravery never goes out of fashion.
The play is done; the curtain drops,
Slow falling to the prompter’s bell
A moment yet the actor stops
And looks around to say farewell.
It is an irksome word and task:
And when he’s laughed and said his say
He shows, as he removes the mask,
A face that’s anything but gay.