Daily Inspiration Quote by William Makepeace Thackeray

Thackeray flicks open Victorian society like a jewel case and shows the paste. The line lands because it’s not really about diamonds; it’s about the social economy of appearances, where value is assigned by whoever gets to do the appraising. A “sham diamond” isn’t just a fake object, it’s a fake person, a fake virtue, a fake pedigree that still catches the light at the right angle. The real sting is in “pass for real”: authenticity matters less than successful performance.

The sly twist, “and vice versa,” is the sharper blade. It admits the counter-tragedy: genuine worth routinely gets misread as cheap, overlooked because it lacks the correct setting, accent, or polish. In Thackeray’s world - the world of Vanity Fair, of status auctions dressed up as morality - perception isn’t a minor distortion; it’s the mechanism that distributes power. The sentence is compact, almost offhand, which is part of its cruelty. Thackeray doesn’t thunder about corruption; he shrugs, as if saying: you know how this goes.

Context matters: writing in a Britain reshaped by money, mobility, and imperial wealth, Thackeray watched old aristocratic signals compete with new commercial ones. That collision made “real” and “fake” harder to sort, and easier to exploit. The quote’s intent is diagnostic, not consoling: if you’re searching for true value, don’t trust the sparkle. Trust the conditions that produced the appraisal - and who benefits from you believing it.