Critics From The United Kingdom

"Macaulay is like a book in breeches...He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful."

"Did you ever hear my definition of marriage? It is, that it resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them."

"He was a one-book man. Some men have only one book in them; others, a library."

"Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach."

"Live always in the best company when you read."

"Heat, ma'am!" I said; "it was so dreadful here, that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones."

"Daniel Webster struck me much like a steam-engine in trousers."

"Praise is the best diet for us, after all."

"To take Macaulay out of literature and society and put him in the House of Commons, is like taking the chief physician out of London during a pestilence."

"As the French say, there are three sexes — men, women, and clergymen."

"My living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way, that it was actually twelve miles from a lemon."

"Ah, you flavour everything; you are the vanilla of society."

"You find people ready enough to do the Samaritan, without the oil and twopence."

"He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again."

"I have, alas, only one illusion left, and that is the Archbishop of Canterbury."

"[He] has not body enough to cover his mind decently with; his intellect is improperly exposed."

"How can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is, "I will see you in the vestry after service.""

"Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship."

"The Smiths never had any arms, and have invariably sealed their letters with their thumbs."

"No furniture so charming as books."

"Economy, in the estimation of common minds, often means the absence of all taste and comfort."

"She looked as if she had walked straight out of the ark."

"Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence. If I lived under the burning sun of the equator, it would be a pleasure to me to think that there were many human beings on the other side of the world who regarded and respected me; I could and would not live if I were alone upon the earth, and cut off from the remembrance of my fellow-creatures. It is not that a man has occasion often to fall back upon the kindness of his friends; perhaps he may never experience the necessity of doing so; but we are governed by our imaginations, and they stand there as a solid and impregnable bulwark against all the evils of life."

"Let every man be occupied, and occupied in the highest employment of which his nature is capable, and die with the consciousness that he has done his best."

"The fox, when caught, is worth nothing: he is followed for the pleasure of following."

"Take short views, hope for the best, and trust in God."

"Avoid shame, but do not seek glory: nothing so expensive as glory."

"It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him."

"The English, generally remarkable for doing very good things in a very bad manner, seem to have reserved the maturity and plenitude of their awkwardness for the pulpit."

"Preaching has become a byword for long and dull conversation of any kind; and whoever wishes to imply, in any piece of writing, the absence of everything agreeable and inviting, calls it a sermon."

"Truth is its [justice's] handmaid, freedom is its child, peace is its companion, safety walks in its steps, victory follows in its train; it is the brightest emanation from the Gospel; it is the greatest attribute of God."

"We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal."

"No one minds what Jeffrey says:[…] it is not more than a week ago that I heard him speak disrespectfully of the Equator."

"The history of the world shows us that men are not to be counted by their numbers, but by the fire and vigour of their passions; by their deep sense of injury; by their memory of past glory; by their eagerness for fresh fame; by their clear and steady resolution of ceasing to live, or of achieving a particular object, which, when it is once formed, strikes off a load of manacles and chains, and gives free space to all heavenly and heroic feelings. All great and extraordinary actions come from the heart. There are seasons in human affairs, when qualities fit enough to conduct the common business of life, are feeble and useless; and when men must trust to emotion, for that safety which reason at such times can never give. These are the feelings which led the ten thousand over the Carduchian mountans; these are the feelings by which a handful of Greeks broke in pieces the power of Persia: they have, by turns, humbled Austria, reduced Spain; and in the fens of the Dutch, and on the mountains of the Swiss, defended the happiness, and revenged the oppressions, of man! God calls all the passions out in their keenness and vigour, for the present safety of mankind. Anger, and revenge, and the heroic mind, and a readiness to suffer;— all the secret strength, all the invisible array, of the feelings,— all that nature has reserved for the great scenes of the world. For the usual hopes, and the common aids of man, are all gone! Kings have perished, armies are subdued, nations mouldered away! Nothing remains, under God, but those passions which have often proved the best ministers of His vengeance, and the surest protectors of the world."

"It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little."

"The fact is that in order to do any thing in this world worth doing, we must not stand shivering on the bank thinking of the cold and the danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can."

"It is a very wise rule in the conduct of the understanding, to acquire early a correct notion of your own peculiar constitution of mind, and to become well acquainted, as a physician would say, with your idiosyncrasy. Are you an acute man, and see sharply for small distances? or are you a comprehensive man, and able to take in, wide and extensive views into your mind? Does your mind turn its ideas into wit? or are you apt to take a common-sense view of the objects presented to you? Have you an exuberant imagination, or a correct judgment? Are you quick, or slow? accurate, or hasty? a great reader, or a great thinker? It is a prodigious point gained if any man can find out where his powers lie, and what are his deficiencies, — if he can contrive to ascertain what Nature intended him for: and such are the changes and chances of the world, and so difficult is it to ascertain our own understandings, or those of others, that most things are done by persons who could have done something else better. If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes upon a table, of different shapes, — some circular, some triangular, some square, some oblong, — and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole. The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly, that we can say they were almost made for each other."

"The truth is, that most men want knowledge, not for itself, but for the superiority which knowledge confers; and the means they employ to secure this superiority, are as wrong as the ultimate object, for no man can ever end with being superior, who will not begin with being inferior."

"Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due."

"A great deal of talent is lost to the world for the want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves a number of obscure men who have only remained obscure because their timidity has prevented them from making a first effort."

"Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything."

"Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained after his time, but mind — which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume, in 1737."

"My idea of heaven is, eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets."

"He not only overflowed with learning but stood in the slops."

"I never read a book before reviewing it: it prejudices a man so."

"[M]en who prefer any load of infamy, however great, to any pressure of taxation, however light."

"Dean Swift's rule is as good for women as for men — never to talk above a half minute without pausing, and giving others an opportunity to strike in."

"It is the safest to be moderately base — to be flexible in shame, and to be always ready for what is generous, good, and just, when anything is to be gained by virtue."

"Every rock in the ocean where a cormorant can perch is occupied by our troops — has a governor, deputy-governor, storekeeper, and deputy-storekeeper — and will soon have an archdeacon and a bishop. Military colleges, with thirty-four professors, educating seventeen ensigns per annum, being half an ensign for each professor, with every species of nonsense, athletic, sartorial, and plumigerous."

"Magnificent spectacle of human happiness."