Daily Inspiration Quote by William Makepeace Thackeray

Thackeray’s line lands like a polite slap: it pretends to praise “worthy” men while quietly accusing them of a petty, very modern vice. The exclamation point after “injuries!” is doing the real work. It’s not just emphasis; it’s the sound of memory snapping to attention, the way resentment arrives with a drumroll while kindness tiptoes out the back door. By framing the question as a rhetorical inevitability - “what worthy man does not” - Thackeray rigs the game. If you admit you remember injuries, you’re “worthy” in the grim social sense of being properly vigilant. If you don’t, you’re naive, unserious, unmanly.

The subtext is an x-ray of status culture: favors are treated as disposable because they don’t threaten the ego, while slights are archived because they do. Injuries aren’t merely painful; they are evidence in an internal trial about respect. The line reads like a diagnosis of how reputations are policed - not by grand moral principles, but by an anxious accounting of who diminished whom, and whether the offense has been “answered.”

Contextually, this fits Thackeray’s broader project as a novelist of manners and hypocrisy. He’s less interested in villains twirling mustaches than in ordinary people performing decency while hoarding grudges. The sentence’s elegance disguises its cynicism: the world runs on selective memory, and “worthiness” often means being skilled at remembering the wrong things for the right social reasons.