J. C. Macaulay Quotes

I went back to the notion of story, which is always a good thing to have if you're trying to get people to pay attention to a book and pick up information along the way.

I'm a big fan of the digestive system.

If you are lucky enough to be successful, you get drawn further in and you stop paying attention to the stuff that matters.

After seeing 'Big,' I wanted an elevator that opened directly into my apartment, just like Tom Hanks did.

Michael Jackson and I talk all the time. I think we understand each other in a way that most people can't understand either of us.

I felt like I had two fathers. I had my real father and the father in my head.

I've always said that acting found me. I didn't really find it.

I'm the most out-of-work actor I know. In the last two years I've basically taken meetings for a living.

It's a place where I could do something on a weekly basis and see if I like it.

It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.

A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.

Work is a dull thing; you cannot get away from that. The only agreeable existence is one of idleness, and that is not, unfortunately, always compatible with continuing to exist at all.

Nearly all novels are too long.

Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.

I seldom meet actors, they are to me bright strange fishes swimming in an element alien to me; I feel that to meet them is to See Life.

One could do with a longer year - so much to do, so little done, alas.

Publishers of course have you altogether in their grip; if they say you must do a thing you have jolly well got to do it.

It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.

Never approach a friend's wife or girlfriend with mischief as your goal... unless she's really attractive.

One should, I think, always give children money, for they will spend it for themselves far more profitably than we can ever spend it for them.

Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.

If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself, put up his own suggestions, and let the best win.

Did you ever look through a microscope at a drop of pond water? You see plenty of love there. All the amoebae getting married. I presume they think it very exciting and important. We don't.

Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.

The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.

the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.

Giving is not at all interesting; but receiving is, there is no doubt about it, delightful.

The last sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost - to lie to oneself. Lying to other people - that's a small thing in comparison.

Why is humanity so excessive in the way it does things? The golden mean seems out of fashion.

Love's a disease. But curable.

what about Christianity? Are we right in the face of so long a record of its poverty in international achievement, to keep invoking it as a standard, almost synonymous with civilization?

miss my daily Mass, and have a superstitious feeling that anything may happen on the days I don't go. However, nothing in particular has.

Churches are wonderful and beautiful, and they are vehicles for religion, but no Church can have more than a very little of the truth.

When I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve.

As freedom is the only safeguard of governments, so are order and moderation generally necessary to preserve freedom.

Our estimate of a character always depends much on the manner in which that character affects our own interests and passions.

Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.

Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.

The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.

If the Sunday had not been observed as a day of rest during the last three centuries, I have not the slightest doubt that we should have been at this moment a poorer people and less civilized.

The Saviour of mankind Himself, in whose blameless life malice could find no act to impeach, has been called in question for words spoken.

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.

No man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.

Men naturally sympathize with the calamities of individuals; but they are inclined to look on a fallen party with contempt rather than with pity.

Great minds do indeed react on the society which has made them what they are; but they only pay with interest what they have received.

No particular man is necessary to the state. We may depend on it that, if we provide the country with popular institutions, those institutions will provide it with great men.

An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.

In after-life you may have friends--fond, dear friends; but never will you have again the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished upon you which none but a mother bestows.

I am always nearest to myself," says the Latin proverb.

The upper current of society presents no pertain criterion by which we can judge of the direction in which the under current flows.