Quote

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

Thomas B. Macaulay

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thomas B. Macaulay
Criticism
Rule
Universal
Poet
Almost
Truth
Laid
May
Poets
Good
Critics

More quotes by Thomas B. Macaulay

Image
Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.
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
This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he is profoundly ignorant.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
It may be laid as an universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
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
Image
I have not the smallest doubt that, if we had a purely democratic government here, the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilisation would perish or order and property would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
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!
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
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
Image
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
The Orientals have another word for accident it is kismet,--fate.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
We do not think it necessary to prove that a quack medicine is poison let the vender prove it to be sanative.
Thomas B. Macaulay