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A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
Cedar
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Solomon
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More quotes by Thomas B. Macaulay

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Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination.
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Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.
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The ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belonged to intellectual superiority.
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Both in individuals and in masses violent excitement is always followed by remission, and often by reaction. We are all inclined to depreciate whatever we have overpraised, and, on the other hand, to show undue indulgence where we have shown undue rigor.
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The upper current of society presents no pertain criterion by which we can judge of the direction in which the under current flows.
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A beggarly people, A church and no steeple.
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Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.
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What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.
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In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
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Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.
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In employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, we are only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to himself.
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The chief-justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.
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The Spartan, smiting and spurning the wretched Helot, moves our disgust. But the same Spartan, calmly dressing his hair, and uttering his concise jests, on what the well knows to be his last day, in the pass of Thermopylae, is not to be contemplated without admiration.
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Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school--its abstract doctrines for the initiated its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables, for the vulgar.
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Every sect clamors for toleration when it is down.
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In perseverance, in self command, in forethought, in all virtues which conduce to success in life, the Scots have never been surpassed.
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Half-knowledge is worse than ignorance.
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Then none was for a party Than all were for the state Then the great man helped the poor, And the poor man loved the great: Then lands were fairly portioned Then spoils were fairly sold: The Romans were like brothers In the brave days of old.
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I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.
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If anybody would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces, and gardens and fine dinners, and wine, and coaches, and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I would not read books, I would not be a king.
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