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Our judgment ripens our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
Enjoy
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More quotes by Thomas B. Macaulay

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Only imagine a man acting for one single day on the supposition that all his neighbors believe all that they profess, and act up to all that they believe!
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He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.
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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.
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A government cannot be wrong in punishing fraud or force, but it is almost certain to be wrong if, abandoning its legitimate function, it tells private individuals that it knows their business better than they know it themselves.
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The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
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The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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.
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Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge but particularly is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems.
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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 ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belonged to intellectual superiority.
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Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man!-To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity to be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries!
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[I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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With the dead there is no rivalry, with the dead there is no change.
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What proposition is there respecting human nature which is absolutely and universally true? We know of only one,--and that is not only true, but identical,--that men always act from self-interest.
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There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.
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People who take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.
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Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.
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