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Grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
Retirement
Gentle
Grief
Meditation
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Makes
Natures
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Inaction
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Spirits

More quotes by Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thus, then, stands the case. It is good, that authors should be remunerated and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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In the plays of Shakespeare man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn.
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The temple of silence and reconciliation.
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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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.
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That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.
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The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.
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Man is so inconsistent a creature that it is impossible to reason from his beliefs to his conduct, or from one part of his belief to another.
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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.
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The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Reform, that we may preserve.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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We must judge of a form of government by it's general tendency, not by happy accidents
Thomas B. Macaulay
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It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors.
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There is no country in Europe which is so easy to over-run as Spain there is no country which it is more difficult to conquer.
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In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
Thomas B. Macaulay