Top 60 Rose Macaulay Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.”

— Rose Macaulay

3. “It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.”

— Rose Macaulay

4. “One could do with a longer year – so much to do, so little done, alas.”

— Rose Macaulay

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

— Rose Macaulay

6. “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.”

— Rose Macaulay

7. “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

8. “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 meanness and selfishness and lying flow love and joy and peace beyond anything that can be imagined.”

— Rose Macaulay

9. “So they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancor.”

— Rose Macaulay

10. “Behavior of such cunning cruelty that only a human being could have thought of or contrived it we call ‘inhuman,’ revealing thus some pathetic ideal standard for our species that survives all betrayals.”

— Rose Macaulay

11. “Words move, turning over like tumbling clowns; like certain books and like fleas, they possess activity. All men equally have the right to say, ‘This word shall bear this meaning,’ and see if they can get it across. It is a sporting game, which all can play, only all cannot win.”

— Rose Macaulay

12. “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.”

— Rose Macaulay

13. “Still I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing. For I sent the bath towel to the wash this morning, and omitted to put out another. I have no towel.”

— Rose Macaulay

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

— Rose Macaulay

15. “The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?”

— Rose Macaulay

16. “News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.”

— Rose Macaulay

17. “Cranks live by theory, not by pure desire. They want votes, peace, nuts, liberty, and spinning-looms not because they love these things, as a child loves jam, but because they think they ought to have them. That is one element which makes the crank.”

— Rose Macaulay

18. “Once you get to know your neighbors, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and speak when you are out and you never feel safe when you are in.”

— Rose Macaulay

19. “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

20. “Age has extremely little to do with anything that matters. The difference between one age and another is, as a rule, enormously exaggerated.”

— Rose Macaulay

21. “She was alone with beauty. She was passionately realizing the moment, its fleeting exquisiteness, its still, fragile beauty. So exquisite it was, so frail and so transitory, that she could have wept, even as she clasped it close. To savor the loveliness of moments, to bathe in them as in a wine-gold, sun-warmed sea, and then to pass on to the next – that was life.”

— Rose Macaulay

22. “Love’s a disease. But curable.”

— Rose Macaulay

23. “Women have one great advantage over men. It is commonly thought that if they marry they have done enough, and need career no further. If a man marries, on the other hand, public opinion is all against him if he takes this view.”

— Rose Macaulay

24. “One day I shall write a little book of conduct myself, and I shall call it Social Problems of the Unsociable. And the root problem, beneath a hundred varying manifestions, is How to Escape. How to escape, that is, at those times, be they few or frequent, when you want to keep yourself to yourself.”

— Rose Macaulay

25. “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

26. “When I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve.”

— Rose Macaulay

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

— Rose Macaulay

28. “Once more the legend flourished that the number of years lived constitutes some kind of temperamental bond, so that people of the same age are many minds with but a single thought, bearing one to another a close resemblance. The young were commented on as if they were some new and just discovered species of animal life, with special qualities and habits which repaid investigation.”

— Rose Macaulay

29. “Take my camel, dear,′ said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.”

— Rose Macaulay

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

— Rose Macaulay

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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.”

— Rose Macaulay

34. “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.”

— Rose Macaulay

35. “The impulse to ask questions is among the more primitive human lusts.”

— Rose Macaulay

36. “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

37. “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.”

— Rose Macaulay

38. “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

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

— Rose Macaulay

40. “Nothing, perhaps, is strange, once you have accepted life itself, the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.”

— Rose Macaulay

41. “It wasn’t really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.”

— Rose Macaulay

42. “Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.”

— Rose Macaulay

43. “Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border.”

— Rose Macaulay

44. “Parents are untamed, excessive, potentially troublesome creatures; charming to be with for a time, in the main they must lead their own lives, independent and self-employed, with companions of their own age and selection...”

— Rose Macaulay

45. “We mused for a while over parents. Then I went on musing about why it was thought better and higher to love one’s country than one’s county, or town, or village, or house. Perhaps because it was larger. But then it would be still better to love one’s continent, and best of all to love one’s planet.”

— Rose Macaulay

46. “Here is one of the points about this planet which should be remembered; into every penetrable corner of it, and into most of the impenetrable corners, the English will penetrate. They are like that; born invaders. They cannot stay at home.”

— Rose Macaulay

47. “You should always believe what you read in the newspapers, for that makes them more interesting.”

— Rose Macaulay

48. “Human passions against eternal laws – that is the everlasting conflict.”

— Rose Macaulay

49. “One mustn’t lose sight of the hard core, which is, do this, do that, love your friends, like your neighbors, be just, be extravagantly generous, be honest, be tolerant, have courage, have compassion, use your wits and your imagination, understand the world you live in and be on terms with it, don’t dramatize and dream and escape. Anyhow that seems to be the pattern.”

— Rose Macaulay

50. “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