Thomas Love Peacock Quotes

A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel.

I will tell you what to hate. Hate hypocrisy, hate cant, hate indolence, oppression, injustice; hate Pharisaism; hate them as Christ hated them with a deep, living, godlike hatred.

True modesty avoids everything that is criminal; false modesty everything that is unfashionable.

I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.

Freedom, Truth, Honour — you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other.

The danger to America is not in the direction of the failure to maintain its economic position, but in the direction of the failure to maintain its ideals.

A great writer has a high respect for values. His essential function is to raise life to the dignity of thought, and this he does by giving it a shape.

A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas - on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor - unless he means something else, quite different - is a rogue.

Debased men, but they all had something in common: They showed a keen regard for virtue, and tried to dress themselves in that costume. Hypocrisy, for all its bad reputation, at least showed a decent respect for goodness.

Or from Browning some "Pomegranate," which if cut deep down the middle Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.

General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocite, flatterer.

The propriety of some persons seems to consist in having improper thoughts about their neighbors.

Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.

Ethical man: A Christian holding four aces.

Honesty's praised, then left to freeze.

The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accursed; Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod, Than be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God.

In the 'bullshit department' a businessman can't hold a candle to a clergyman.

Not to admire, is all the art I know To make men happy, or to keep them so. Thus Horace wrote we all know long ago; And thus Pope quotes the precept to re-teach From his translation; but had none admired, Would Pope have sung, or Horace been inspired?

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.

Many among men are they who set high the show of honor, yet break justice.

You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally, the stuttering, blunderingclod-hopper that I am. Even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag and exaggeration. Not that I do not stand on all that I have written,--but what am I to the truth I feebly utter?

Modest about our national pride - and inordinately proud of our national modesty.

Modesty is only arrogance by stealth.