Quotes by Critics - Page 12

Talent is that which is in a man's power genius is that in whose power a man is.
James Russell Lowell
Doing easily what others find is difficult is talent doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
We define genius as the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.
Bernard Berenson
It takes a long time to grow an old friend.
John Leonard
If our friends' idealizations of us need the corrective of our own experience it may be true also that our own sordid view of our lives needs the corrective of our friends' idealizations.
Oscar W. Firkins
True friendship is self-love at second hand.
William Hazlitt
We often choose a friend as we do a mistress for no particular excellence in themselves but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.
William Hazlitt
We need new friends. Some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact an ideal version of their lives.
Logan Pearsall Smith
To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love are the two greatest proofs not only of goodness of heart but of strength of mind.
William Hazlitt
Scratch a lover and find a foe.
Dorothy Parker
A man with few friends is only half-developed there are whole sides of his nature which are locked up and have never been expressed. He cannot unlock them himself he cannot even discover them friends alone can stimulate him and open him.
Randolph Bourne
We are fonder of visiting our friends in health than in sickness. We judge less favorably of their characters when any misfortune happens to them and a lucky hit either in business or reputation improves even their personal appearance in our eyes.
William Hazlitt
There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.
Anne Stevenson
Don't tell your friends their social faults they will cure the fault and never forgive you.
Logan Pearsall Smith
It is well there is no one without fault for he would not have a friend in the world. He would seem to belong to a different species.
William Hazlitt
I am quite sure that no friendship yields its true pleasure and nobility of nature without frequent communication sympathy and service.
George E. Woodberry
The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Good friendships are fragile things and require as much care as any other fragile and precious thing.
Randolph Bourne
Friendship of itself a holy tie is made more sacred by adversity.
John Dryden
Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
William Hazlitt
Who is content with nothing possesses all things.
Nicolas Boileau
Happiness is a way station between too much and too little.
Channing Pollock
No man can be satisfied with his attainment although he may be satisfied with his circumstances.
Frank Swinnerton
Is there no end to this escalation of desire?
Marya Mannes
Happiness is composed of misfortunes avoided.
Alphonse Karr
How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years gotten enough to eat and escaped being eaten?
Logan Pearsall Smith
Good heavens of what uncostly material is our earthly happiness composed ... if we only knew it. What incomes have we not had from a flower and how unfailing are the dividends of the seasons.
James Russell Lowell
We must give ourselves more earnestly and intelligently and generously than we have to the happy duty of appreciation.
Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer
One is as one is and the love that can't encompass both is a poor sort of love.
Marya Mannes
The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.
George Bernard Shaw
The right to be a cussed fool Is safe from all devices human It's common (ez a gin'I rule) To every critter born of woman.
James Russell Lowell
What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do.
George Bernard Shaw
A fool always finds one still more foolish to admire him.
Nicolas Boileau
Every inch that is not fool is rogue.
John Dryden
There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
George Bernard Shaw
Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses.
Dorothy Parker
Men who look young act young and everlastingly harp on the fact that they are young-but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution what would be excessive in their grandfathers-are the curses of the world.
Robertson Davies
Fashion which elevates the bad to the level of the good subsequently turns its back on bad and good alike.
Eric Bentley
Fashions after all are only induced epidemics.
George Bernard Shaw
The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant - and let the air out of the tires.
Dorothy Parker
Friendships are fragile things and require as much care in handling as any other fragile and precious thing.
Randolph Bourne
One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
Randall Jarrell
Blessed be childhood which brings down something of heaven into the midst of our rough earthliness.
Henri Amiel
The dark uneasy world of family life - where the greatest can fail and the humblest succeed.
Randall Jarrell
Though familiarity may not breed contempt it takes off the edge of admiration.
William Hazlitt
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
H.L. Mencken
Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
George Bernard Shaw
To win true peace a man needs to feel himself directed pardoned and sustained by a supreme power to feel himself in the right road at the point where God would have him be-in order with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weather is that which is woven of conviction.
James Russell Lowell
Faith is necessary to victory.
William Hazlitt
Faith is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience.
James Russell Lowell
Faith is a certitude without proofs ... a sentiment for it is a hope it is an instinct for it precedes all outward instruction.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
We cannot hand our faith to one another. ... Even in the Middle Ages when faith was theoretically uniform it was always practically individual.
John Jay Chapman
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw
Men are wise in proportion not to their experience but to their capacity for experience.
George Bernard Shaw
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
James Russell Lowell
Deep experience is never peaceful.
Henry James
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
George Bernard Shaw
Humor is an antidote to isolation.
Elizabeth Janeway
Whatever evil befalls us we ought to ask ourselves ... how we can turn it into good. So shall we take occasion from one bitter root to raise perhaps many flowers.
Leigh Hunt