William Makepeace Thackeray
Quotations

"I never know whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses. "

 

"How hard it is to make an Englishman acknowledge that he is happy!"

- Pendennis. Book ii. Chap. xxxi.

 

"There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write."

 

"To endure is greater than to dare; to tire out hostile fortune; to be daunted by no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it -- who can say this is not greatness?"

 

"It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all."

- Pendennis (chapter VI)

 

"Fiddles sing all through them; wax lights, fine dresses,
fine jokes, fine plate, fine equipages glitter and sparkle;
never was such a brilliant, smirking Vanity Fair as that
through which he leads us."

 

"I think the Bishops who advised Queen Anne not to appoint the author of the Tale of a Tub to a Bishopric gave perfectly good advice."

 

"A life prosperous and beautiful, a calm death; an immense fame and affection afterwards for his happy and spotless name."

 

"[He is] the first ambassador whom the New World of letters sent to the Old."

 

"There is no writing against such power"