Top 200 Quotes & Sayings by Thomas B. Macaulay - Page 4

A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.

That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.

This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he is profoundly ignorant.

In employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, we are only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to himself.

He [Charles II] was utterly without ambition. He detested business, and would sooner have abdicated his crown than have undergone the trouble of really directing the administration.

The whole history of Christianity proves that she has little indeed to fear from persecution as a foe, but much to fear from persecution as an ally.

Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses.

Queen Mary had a way of interrupting tattle about elopements, duels, and play debts, by asking the tattlers, very quietly yet significantly, whether they had ever read her favorite sermon--Dr. Tillotson on Evil Speaking.

Ye diners out from whom we guard our spoons.

It is certain that satirical poems were common at Rome from a very early period. The rustics, who lived at a distance from the seat of government, and took little part in the strife of factions, gave vent to their petty local animosities in coarse Fescennine verse.

The sweeter sound of woman's praise.

Satire is, indeed, the only sort of composition in which the Latin poets whose works have come down to us were not mere imitators of foreign models; and it is therefore the sort of composition in which they have never been excelled.

He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.

The passages in which Milton has alluded to his own circumstances are perhaps read more frequently, and with more interest, than any other lines in his poems.

All the walks of literature are infested with mendicants for fame, who attempt to excite our interest by exhibiting all the distortions of their intellects and stripping the covering from all the putrid sores of their feelings.

A few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi to the dust and silence of the upper shelf... For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawing-room, and a few columns in every magazine; and it will then be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming novelties.

Cut off my head, and singular I am, Cut off my tail, and plural I appear; Although my middle's left, there's nothing there! What is my head cut off? A sounding sea; What is my tail cut off? A rushing river; And in their mingling depths I fearless play, Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.

Byron owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry.

How well Horatius kept the bridge In the brave days of old.

Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.