Introduction
The allusion to the "tigers of wrath" and "horses of instruction" is from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Proverbs of Hell
The Portable Matthew Arnold (Viking Press, 1949)
Context: Disgust is expressed by violence, and it is to be noted of our intellectual temper that violence is a quality which is felt to have a peculiarly intellectual sanction. Our preference, even as articulated by those who are most mild in their persons, is increasingly for the absolute and extreme, of which we feel violence to be the true sign. The gentlest of us will know that the tigers of wrath are to be preferred to the horses of instruction and will consider it intellectual cowardice to take into account what happens to those who ride tigers.
“The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”
Source: 1790s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793), Proverbs of Hell, Line 44
Source: Songs of Innocence and of Experience
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William Blake 249
English Romantic poet and artist 1757–1827Related quotes
Book V, fable 9, line 4.
Fables
Lines (1795)
Context: If Thou be one whose heart the holy forms
Of young imagination have kept pure
Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know that pride,
Howe'er disguised in its own majesty,
Is littleness; that he who feels contempt
For any living thing, hath faculties
Which he has never used; that thought with him
Is in its infancy. The man whose eye
Is ever on himself doth look on one,
The least of Nature's works, one who might move
The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds
Unlawful, ever. O be wiser, thou!
Instructed that true knowledge leads to love;
True dignity abides with him alone
Who, in the silent hour of inward thought,
Can still suspect, and still revere himself,
In lowliness of heart.
Source: The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great
“3403. Men seek less to be instructed than applauded.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“You know horses are smarter than people. You never heard of a horse going broke betting on people.”
“People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.”
“Nothing is of greater importance than the right early instruction of youth.”
History of the State of New York By John Romeyn Brodhead, pg 508 : 1660 on the education of Youth.
“There is nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse.”
According to The quote verifier: who said what, where, and when (2006), Keyes, Macmillan, p. 91 ISBN 0312340044 , the cover of a trade magazine once credited this observation to Churchill, but it dates back well into the nineteenth century, and has been variously attributed to Henry Ward Beecher, Oliver Wendell Holmes, w:Theodore Roosevelt, w:Thomas Jefferson, w:Will Rogers and Lord Palmerston, among others. One documented use in Social Silhouettes (1906) by George William Erskine Russell, p. 218 wherein a character attributes the saying to Lord Palmerston.
Misattributed