Rose Macaulay Quotes

74 Sourced Quotes

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

Rose Macaulay
Mozart is everyone's tea, pleasing to highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows alike, though they probably all get different kinds of pleasure from him.

Rose Macaulay
Cruelty was the devil, and most people were, in one way or another, cruel. Tyranny, suppression, persecution, torture, slavery, war, neglect — all were cruel. The world was acid and sour with hate, fat with greed, yellow with the triumph of the strong and the rich.

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

Rose Macaulay
He would do the thing thoroughly. He would enter once more into that great ark of refuge from perplexing thoughts, the Roman branch of the Catholic Church.

Rose Macaulay
Sleeping in a bed — it is, apparently, of immense importance. Against those who sleep, from choice or necessity, elsewhere society feels righteously hostile. It is not done. It is disorderly, anarchical.

Rose Macaulay
For that is what adultery is, a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of this meanness and this selfishness and this lying flow love and joy and peace, beyond anything that can be imagined.

Rose Macaulay
She probably labored under the common delusion that you made things better by talking about them.

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

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

Rose Macaulay
There's one thing about freedom... each generation of people begins by thinking they've got it for the first time in history, and ends by being sure the generation younger than themselves have too much of it. It can't really always have been increasing at the rate people suppose, or there would be more of it by now.

Rose Macaulay
A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?

Rose Macaulay
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.

Rose Macaulay
Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.

Rose Macaulay
How agreeable to watch, from the other side of the high stile, this mighty creature, this fat bull of Bashan, snorting, champing, pawing the earth, lashing the tail, breathing defiance at heaven and at me... his heart hot with hate, unable to climb a stile.

Rose Macaulay
We cannot hide from one another: we know too much. We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.

Rose Macaulay
To lunch with the important... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.

Rose Macaulay
God very seldom succeeds. He has very nearly everything against him, of course.

Rose Macaulay
Televiewers in this country are not on the whole an intellectual type.

Rose Macaulay
The superior thing... was to be late. Lateness showed that serene contempt for the illusion we call time which is so necessary to ensure the respect of others and oneself. Only the servile are punctual.

Rose Macaulay
The very utterness of the crash and ruin, the desperation of the case, might be its hope. On ruins one can begin to build. Anyhow, looking out from ruins one clearly sees; there are no obstructing walls.

Rose Macaulay
Her children are either deceased, or following some profession abroad. I too follow professions, but at some distance behind, and seldom catch up with them.

Rose Macaulay
To be prejudiced is the privilege of the thinking human being.... The open mind is the empty mind.

Rose Macaulay
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.

Rose Macaulay
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.

Rose Macaulay
The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?

Rose Macaulay
His book... makes nice reading for people. But what's the use? Except, of course, to kill time for those who prefer it dead.

Rose Macaulay
Life, for all its agonies... is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing... and whatever is to come after it — we shall not have this life again.

Rose Macaulay
Denham felt the relief that follows unaccepted hospitality.

Rose Macaulay
News is like food; it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.

Rose Macaulay