Wit & Attitude Quote by William Makepeace Thackeray

Thackeray lands the jab with that trademark Victorian cocktail of manners and malice: the world flatters itself that it rewards merit, but desire keeps voting for packaging. The line works because it pretends to offer a calm social observation while smuggling in a harsher claim about how “irresistible” attraction can be when it’s lubricated by status, visibility, and sheer aesthetic momentum. “Every now and then” is doing quiet work here: it concedes the occasional triumph of wit over looks, then sharply limits it to an exception, the kind of exception polite society points to in order to keep believing it’s fair.

The more poisonous joke is that Thackeray doesn’t even grant handsomeness the dignity of intelligence. The “handsome fool” wins not despite his emptiness but because of it; there’s no threat, no complexity, nothing to negotiate. Irresistible can mean magnetic, but it also means unresisted: people stop arguing with their own better judgment. The clever ugly man has to perform, to compensate, to stay “clever” on demand. The handsome fool gets to be a blank screen for projection, a walking invitation to romantic self-deception.

Context matters: Thackeray’s novels (Vanity Fair especially) are obsessed with how societies convert surfaces into value. He’s writing in a culture newly fascinated with mobility and display, where charm is currency and women’s choices are constrained by marriage markets as much as they’re stirred by desire. The line isn’t a timeless law; it’s a cynical snapshot of a world where attractiveness functions like inherited wealth: unearned, socially ratified, and wildly persuasive even when attached to mediocrity.