Daily Inspiration Quote by William Makepeace Thackeray

“Bravery never goes out of fashion” sounds like a compliment, but coming from Thackeray it carries the faint sting of a novelist who spent his career skewering the vanity of polite society. He knew fashion isn’t just hemlines and manners; it’s a social currency, a system that decides what gets admired, rewarded, and imitated. By yoking bravery to fashion, he’s flattering courage while also mocking the fickle mechanisms that typically distribute praise.

The line works because it’s a sly reversal. Fashion, by definition, is temporary. Bravery, in the Victorian moral imagination, was supposed to be permanent: a stabilizing virtue in an age obsessed with appearances. Thackeray’s phrasing borrows the language of drawing rooms and newspapers to smuggle in a moral claim: amid all the posturing, there remains at least one trait that retains value even when tastes change. The subtext is less “be brave” than “see through the costume jewelry of status.” Courage is the one accessory that doesn’t tarnish.

Context matters: Thackeray wrote during a period when Britain’s public ideals (duty, empire, respectability) collided with private hypocrisies. In Vanity Fair, he anatomizes a world where people perform virtue for applause. Against that backdrop, bravery becomes a quiet rebuke to performative goodness. It’s not the bravery of medals and pageantry; it’s the kind that resists the room’s opinion, that holds up when admiration moves on.

He offers a moral anchor, but he delivers it with a wink: even virtue, he implies, survives partly because it’s always been legible to an audience.