Quotes by Critics - Page 14

Courage is clearly a readiness to risk self-humiliation.
Nigel Dennis
How then find the courage for action? By slipping a little into unconsciousness spontaneity instinct which holds one to the earth and dictates the relatively good and useful. ... By accepting the human condition more simply and candidly by dreading troubles less calculating less hoping more.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Fate loves the fearless.
James Russell Lowell
We can easily become as much slaves to precaution as we can to fear.
Randolph Bourne
What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?
Logan Pearsall Smith
None but the brave deserve the fair.
John Dryden
We must have the courage to be happy.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard but by attacking and getting well-hammered yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Fortune befriends the bold.
John Dryden
Fight on my merry men all I'm a little wounded but I am not slain I will lay me down for to bleed a while Then I'll rise and fight with you again.
John Dryden
You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Penetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless calmly licking its chops.
H.L. Mencken
Every life is a possession of faith and exercises an inevitable and silent propaganda.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Whether you are really right or not doesn't matter it's the belief that counts.
Robertson Davies
Wit is the salt of conversation not the food.
William Hazlitt
Silence is one great art of conversation.
William Hazlitt
As I got warmed up and felt perfectly at home in talk I heard myself boasting lying exaggerating. Oh not deliberately far from it. It would be unconvivial and dull to stop and arrest the flow of talk and speak only after carefully considering whether I was telling the truth.
Bernard Berenson
She had lost the art of conversation but not unfortunately the power of speech.
George Bernard Shaw
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
H.L. Mencken
Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof it is a temporary expedient often wise in party politics almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.
James Russell Lowell
Tis always morning somewhere in the world.
Richard Hengest Horne
Cleverness is serviceable for everything sufficient for nothing.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.
V.S. Pritchett
Civilizations die from philosophical calm irony and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.
Joseph Wood Krutch
The itch of disputing is the scab of the churches.
Sir Henry Wotton
Let us be of good cheer remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen.
James Russell Lowell
Every man has three characters - that which he exhibits that which he has and that which he thinks he has.
Alphonse Karr
If Ford Madox Ford were placed stark naked in a room totally empty he would contrive to turn it into a mess.
Ezra Pound
Individualism is rather like innocence there must be something unconscious about it.
Louis Kronenberger
Self-denial is not a virtue it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
George Bernard Shaw
A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn't care to drink with - even if he drank.
H.L. Mencken
The time is ripe and rotten-ripe for change then let it come.
James Russell Lowell
When people shake their heads because we are living in a restless age ask them how they would like to life in a stationary one and do without change.
George Bernard Shaw
O visionary world condition strange Where naught abiding is but only change.
James Russell Lowell
The more things change the more they stay the same. (Plus ca change plus c'est la meme chose.)
Alphonse Karr
All professions are a conspiracy against the country.
George Bernard Shaw
I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
George Bernard Shaw
It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law than it takes to operate a taxi cab or fry a pan of fish.
H.L. Mencken
The Canadian spirit is cautious observant and critical where the American is assertive.
V.S. Pritchett
Canada was settled in the main by people with a lower middle-class outlook and a respect rather than an affectionate familiarity for the things of the mind.
Robertson Davies
The first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada.
T.E. Hulme
My generation of Canadians grew up believing that if we were very good or very smart or both we would some day graduate from Canada.
Robert Fulford
One of the cool chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.
John Updike
None but the brave deserves the fair.
John Dryden
Passions are less mischievous than boredom for passions tend to diminish and boredom increase.
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
As for boredom ... I notice that it leaves me as soon as I am doing something that has got to be done.
John Jay Chapman
One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Peace is not only better than war but infinitely more arduous.
George Bernard Shaw
Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.
William Dean Howells
The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy but that it is a bore.
H.L. Mencken
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
John Updike
We may be willing to tell a story twice never to hear it more than once.
William Hazlitt
What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us!
James Russell Lowell
Does it afflict you to find your books wearing out? I mean literally .. . the mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me but that of books most of all.
William Dean Howells
Properly we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
Ezra Pound
Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
Discretion is not the better part of biography.
Lytton Strachey
Always a godfather - never a god!
Alexander Woollcott
Where unwilling dies the rose Buds the new another year.
Dorothy Parker