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

Vol. I, ch. 2.
Vanity Fair (1847–1848)
Context: 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.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face." by William Makepeace Thackeray?
William Makepeace Thackeray photo
William Makepeace Thackeray 69
novelist 1811–1863

Related quotes

Zora Neale Hurston photo
James Russell Lowell photo
Adlai Stevenson photo

“It will be helpful in our mutual objective to allow every man in America to look his neighbor in the face and see a man — not a color.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Foreword to booklet on interracial relations prepared by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, as quoted in The New York Times (22 June 1964)

Virginia Woolf photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”

"Psychological Observations"
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Studies in Pessimism
Variant: Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
Source: Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

Erving Goffman photo

“Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.”

Erving Goffman (1922–1982) Sociologist, writer, academic

Erving Goffman (1967: 10), as cited in: Trevino (2003,, p. 37).
1950s-1960s

Albert Schweitzer photo

“The man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life in his own.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics

Adam Smith photo
Edward de Bono photo

“Philosophers may look out at the world from a stained-glass window, but after a while they stop looking at the world and start looking at the stained glass.”

Edward de Bono (1933) Maltese physician

Iraq? They just need to think it through (2007)
Context: What happened was, 2,400 years ago, the Greek Gang of Three, by whom I mean Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, started to think based on analysis, judgment and knowledge. At the same time, church people, who ran the schools and universities, wanted logic to prove the heretics wrong. As a result, design and perceptual thinking was never developed. People assumed philosophers were doing it and so they blocked anyone else from doing it. But philosophers were not. Philosophers may look out at the world from a stained-glass window, but after a while they stop looking at the world and start looking at the stained glass.

Related topics