“Cruel, but composed and bland,
Dumb, inscrutable and grand,
So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat.”

" Poor Matthias http://www.flippyscatpage.com/frompoormatthias.html" (1867)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat." by Matthew Arnold?
Matthew Arnold photo
Matthew Arnold 166
English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector… 1822–1888

Related quotes

Tiberius photo

“Fear of this possibility in particular led Tiberius to ask the senate for any part in the administration that it might please them to assign him, saying that no one man could bear the whole burden without a colleague, or even several colleagues.”
Quem maxime casum timens, partes sibi quas senatui liberet, tuendas in re p[ublica]. depoposcit, quando universae sufficere solus nemo posset nisi cum altero vel etiam cum pluribus.

Tiberius (-42–37 BC) 2nd Emperor of Ancient Rome, member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty

Variant translation (by Robert Graves): "Pray assign me any part in the government you please; but remember that no single man can bear the whole burden of Empire — I need a colleague, or perhaps several colleagues."
From Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, ch. 25

“It is the only one in existence that might conceivably have been composed by God.”

Neville Cardus (1888–1975) English writer

Of Mozart's "The Magic Flute"; Manchester Guardian (1961)

Lewis Carroll photo
Jonathan Miller photo

“Nothing but man was really cruel, vindictive, except perhaps the loathly cat.”

Source: Sirius (1944), Chapter VIII Sirius at Cambridge.

Eugene Field photo
David Foster Wallace photo
Philip José Farmer photo

“Suddenly he was weeping. The tears were for the good things that had been or might have been, for the bad things that had been but should not have been.”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

Source: The Riverworld series, The Dark Design (1977), Ch. 67

Related topics