Quotes by Critics - Page 15

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.
Dorothy Parker
Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty hesitation or incongruity.
William Hazlitt
The artist like the idiot or clown sits on the edge of the world and a push may send him over it.
Osbert Sitwell
Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
H.L. Mencken
We must grant the artist his subject his idea his donnee: Our criticisms apply only to what he makes of it.
Henry James
Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
Ezra Pound
I wonder whether Art has a higher function than to make me feel appreciate and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
Bernard Berenson
A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.
George Bernard Shaw
There is no good arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
James Russell Lowell
The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
George Bernard Shaw
Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe and restores to us forgotten paradises.
Edith Sitwell
Poetry is something to make us wiser and better by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth which God has set in all men's souls.
James Russell Lowell
Without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw
How often the fear of one evil leads into a worse.
Nicolas Bouleau-Despreaux
Only man clogs his happiness with care destroying what is with thoughts of what may be.
John Dryden
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell
Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.
Joseph Wood Krutch
Beware the fury of a patient man.
John Dryden
A Bostonian - an American broadly speaking.
G. E. Woodberry
The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.
Joseph Wood Krutch
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
H.L. Mencken
A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.
V.S. Pritchett
He speaks English with the flawless imperfection of a New Yorker.
Gilbert Millstein
New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its predicted end ... it is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization the first permanent civilization in America.
Bernard de Voto
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
John Updike
Ours is the country where in order to sell your product you don't so much point out its merits as you first work like hell to sell yourself.
Louis Kronenberger
They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much.
Malcolm Cowley
Ambition has but one reward for all: A little power a little transient fame A grave to rest in and a fading name!
William Winter
To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
My opportunities were still there nay they multiplied tenfold but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience.
George Bernard Shaw
We grow neither better nor worse as we get old but more like ourselves
May Lamberton Becker
The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people and greatly assists the circulation of their blood.
Logan Pearsall Smith
It is the fear of being as dependent as a young child while not being loved as a child is loved but merely being kept alive against one's will.
Malcolm Cowley
We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have moldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty interest after interest attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.
William Hazlitt
To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Prosperity is a great teacher adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind privation trains and strengthens it.
William Hazlitt
The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way: an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body.
William Hazlitt
You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
George Bernard Shaw
Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.
Edith Sitwell
A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man it is what he wants and must have to be good for anything. Hardship and opposition are the native soil of manhood and self-reliance.
John Neal
They sicken of calm who know the storm.
Dorothy Parker
They sicken of the calm that know the storm.
Dorothy Parker
Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
James Russell Lowell
For purposes of action nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The unique thing about Margaret Rutherford is that she can act with her chin alone. Among its many moods I especially cherish the chin commanding the chin in doubt and the chin at bay.
Kenneth Tynan
Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.
James Agate
True tragedy may be defined as a dramatic work in which the outward failure of the principal personage is compensated for by the dignity and greatness of his character.
Joseph Wood Krutch
She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.
Clive James
Actors are the only honest hypocrites.
William Hazlitt
A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.
Kenneth Tynan
Ours must be the first age whose great goal on a nonmaterial plane is not fulfillment but adjustment.
Louis Kronenberger
To repel one's cross is to make it heavier.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
James Russell Lowell
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they might have been.
William Hazlitt
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
George Bernard Shaw
There are two kinds of people: those who are always well and those who are always sick. Most of the evils of the world come from the first sort and most of the achievements from the second.
Louis Dudek
It seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush; the life of the town was itself under a spell--so unnaturally, up and down the whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and the silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit? Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the heart of cities, for the small hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large collective negation that Brydon presently became conscious--all the more that the break of day was, almost incredibly, now at hand, proving to him what night he had made of it.
Henry James
Again, we find that the space standards of twenty-first century luxury are below the required minimum for dockworkers in 1962.
Owen Hatherley
Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?
Bernard Shaw George
We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
John Updike