Vanity Fair

Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural.

Never lose a chance of saying a kind word.

Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.

All is vanity, nothing is fair.

If a man's character is to be abused, say what you will, there's nobody like a relative to do the business.

A woman may possess the wisdom and chastity of Minerva, and we give no heed to her, if she has a plain face. What folly will not a pair of bright eyes make pardonable? What dullness may not red lips are sweet accents render pleasant? And so, with their usual sense of justice, ladies argue that because a woman is handsome, therefore she is a fool. O ladies, ladies! there are some of you who are neither handsome nor wise.

The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.

Are not there little chapters in everybody's life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?

In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone.

The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.

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?

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.

A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES.

...the greatest tyrants over women are women.

One of the great conditions of anger and hatred is, that you must tell and believe lies against the hated object, in order, as we said, to be consistent.

it is the ordinary lot of people to have no friends if they themselves care for nobody

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.

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 trameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably!

She lived in her past life- these relics and remembrances of dead affection were all that was left her in the world.

If a man has committed wrong in life, I don't know any moralist more anxious to point his errors out to the world than his own relations...

When one fib becomes due as it were, you must forge another to take up the old acceptance; and so the stock of your lies in circulation inevitably multiplies, and the danger of detection increases every day.

Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions.

If people only made prudent marriages, what a stop to population there would be!

Praise everybody, I say to such: never be squeamish, but speak out your compliment both point-blank in a man's face, and behind his back, when you know there is a reasonable chance of his hearing it again. Never lose a chance of saying a kind word. As Collingwood never saw a vacant place in his estate but he took an acorn out of his pocket and popped it in; so deal with your compliments through life. An acorn costs nothing; but it may sprout into a prodigious bit of timber.

All the world used her ill, said this young misanthropist, ... and we may be pretty certain that persons whom all the world treats ill, deserve entirely the treatment they get. The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.

Money has only a different value in the eyes of each.

The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

She had not character enough to take to drinking, and moaned about, slip-shod and in curl-papers, all day.