Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.

(William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), British author. Vanity Fair, ch. 67 (1848).)

How to live well on nothing a year.

(William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), British author. Vanity Fair, ch. 36 (title of chapter) (1848).)

Whenever he met a great man he grovelled before him, and my-lorded him as only a free-born Briton can do.

(William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), British author. Vanity Fair, ch. 13 (1848). Referring to Mr. Osborne.)

It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England.

(William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), British author. The Four Georges, "George the Third," (1855).)

Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

(William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), British author. The History of Henry Esmond, bk. 1, ch. 7 (1852).)

We are accustomed to laugh at the French for their braggadocio propensities, and intolerable vanity about la France, la gloire, l'Empereur, and the like; and yet I think in my heart that the British Snob, for conceit and self-sufficiency and braggartism in his way, is without a parallel. There is always something uneasy in a Frenchman's conceit. He brags with so much fury, shrieking, and gesticulation; yells out so loudly that the Francais is at the head of civilization, the centre of thought, etc., that one can't but see the poor fellow has a lurking doubt in his own mind that he is not the wonder he professes to be. About the British Snob, on the contrary, there is commonly no noise, no bluster, but the calmness of profound conviction. We are better than all the world; we don't question the opinion at all; it's an axiom.

(William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), British novelist. The Book of Snobs, ch. 22 (1848).)

We who have lived before railways were made belong to another world.... It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and then! Then was the old world. Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armour, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue, and so forth?all these belong to the old period.... But your railroad starts the new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one.... We who lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.

(William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), British author. "De Juventute," The Roundabout Papers (1863).)

If, in looking at the lives of princes, courtiers, men of rank and fashion, we must perforce depict them as idle, profligate, and criminal, we must make allowances for the rich men's failings, and recollect that we, too, were very likely indolent and voluptuous, had we no motive for work, a mortal's natural taste for pleasure, and the daily temptation of a large income. What could a great peer, with a great castle and park, and a great fortune, do but be splendid and idle?

(William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), British author. "George the Third," The Four Georges (1855).)

I would rather make my name than inherit it.

(William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), British author. The Virginians, ch. 26 (1857-1859).)

Now they heap the funeral pyre,
And the torch of death they light;
Ah! 'tis hard to die by fire!

(William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), British novelist. Pocahontas (l. 9-11). . . Favorite Poems Old and New. Helen Ferris, ed. (1957) Doubleday & Company.)