Quote

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.

Thomas B. Macaulay

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thomas B. Macaulay
Poetry
Influence
Byron
Least
Owed
Power
Contemporaries
Real
Exercised
Much
Gloomy
Egotism
Vast

More quotes by Thomas B. Macaulay

Image
A few more years will destroy whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
With respect to the doctrine of a future life, a North American Indian knows just as much as any ancient or modern philosopher.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
A beggarly people, A church and no steeple.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
The ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belonged to intellectual superiority.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
The Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
In employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, we are only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to himself.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
The reluctant obedience of distant provinces generally costs more than it - The Territory is worth. Empires which branch out widely are often more flourishing for a little timely pruning.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
In the modern languages there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.
Thomas B. Macaulay