William Makepeace Thackeray

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

"Good humour may be said to be one of the very best articles of dress one can wear in society."

"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."

"But oh, Mesdames, if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and tetrameter, may all Poetry go t…"

"'Tis not the dying for a faith that's so hard, Master Harry — every man of every nation has done that — 'tis the living up to it that is difficult, as I know to my cost."

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

"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; to go through intrigue spotless; and to forgo even ambition when th…"

"I should like to see before I die, and think of it daily more and more, the commencement of Jesus Christ's christianism in the world, where I am sure people may be made a hundred times happier than by…"