“That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.”
On Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1831)
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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay 101
British historian and Whig politician 1800–1859Related quotes
“The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.”
“We always like those who admire us; we do not always like those whom we admire.”
Nous aimons toujours ceux qui nous admirent; et nous n'aimons pas toujours ceux que nous admirons.
Maxim 294.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
“To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind.”
Journal kept by Cooper from January to May 1848
Correspondence of James Fenimore-Cooper (1922)
“Admire as much as you can. Most people do not admire enough.”
1870s
Variant: Find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful.
Source: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Dune Genesis (1980)
Context: Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem.
It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane. … Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.
It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous.