Quotes by Critics - Page 3

The only way to live is to accept each minute as an unrepeatable miracle which is exactly what it is: a miracle and unrepeatable.
Storm Jameson
We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves unable to see that here now this very moment is sacred but once it's gone-its value is incontestable.
Joyce Carol Oates
It is privilege of living to be ... acutely agonizingly conscious of the moment that is always present and always passing.
Marya Mannes
The real offence as she ultimately perceived was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his - attached to his own like a small garden plot to a deer park.
Henry James
One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.
Paul Bourget
Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is doing a public service.
Leslie Stephen
Take a winter as you find him and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow with no nonsense in him: and tolerating none in you which is a great comfort in the long run.
James Russell Lowell
May is a pious fraud of the almanac A ghastly parody of real Spring Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind.
James Russell Lowell
Honest Winter snow-clad and with the frosted beard I can welcome not uncordially But that long deferment of the calendar's promise that weeping gloom of March and April that bitter blast outraging the honour of May how often has it robbed me of heart and hope?
George Gissing
The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.
William Hazlitt
Who controls the past controls the future who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell
We are here and it is now. Further than that all knowledge is moonshine.
H.L. Mencken
So often we rob tomorrow's memories by today's economies.
John Mason Brown
I believe that only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present.
Storm Jameson
There is one thing we can do and the happiest people are those who do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present. We can be all here. We can ... give all our attention to the opportunity before us.
Mark Van Doren
Old times never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year and that's better.
George E. Woodberry
The past is a foreign country they do things differently there.
Leslie Poles Hartley
The past is a funeral gone by.
Edmund Gosse
One man who has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
George Bernard Shaw
The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.
George Bernard Shaw
Only man clogs his happiness with care destroying what is with thoughts of what may be.
John Dryden
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is in fact a return to the idealized past.
Robertson Davies
A hick town is one in which there is no place to go where you shouldn't be.
Alexander Woollcott
We might define an eccentric as a man who is law unto himself and a crank as one who having determined what the law is insists on laying it down to others.
Louis Kronenberger
There is nothing good to be had in the country or if there be they will not let you have it.
William Hazlitt
Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.
George Bernard Shaw
Tears are Summer showers to the soul.
Alfred Austin
He who can does. He who can't teaches.
George Bernard Shaw
Governments last as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
Bernard Berenson
In general those who nothing have to say Contrive to spend the longest time in doing it.
James Russell Lowell
But far more numerous was the herd of stfch Who think too little and who talk too much.
John Dryden
If a person has no delicacy he has you in his power.
William Hazlitt
Success covers a multitude of blunders.
George Bernard Shaw
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
George Bernard Shaw
Granting our wish is one of Fate's saddest jokes.
James Russell Lowell
The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy ... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
Henry James
How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?
Logan Pearsall Smith
What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?
Logan Pearsall Smith
A strong passion for any object will ensure success for the desire of the end will point out the means.
William Hazlitt
The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them make them.
George Bernard Shaw
To burn always with this hard gemlike flame to maintain this ecstasy is success in life.
Walter Pater
How can they say my life isn't a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?
Logan Pearsall Smith
A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.
William Hazlitt
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: wlien the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
George Bernard Shaw
International sport is war without shooting.
George Orwell
I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
H.L. Mencken
If you can't have faith in what is held up to you for faith you must find things to believe in yourself for life without faith in something is too narrow a space to live.
George Edward Woodberry
That which is repeated too often becomes insipid and tedious.
Nicolas Boileau
Though old the thought and oft exprest 'tis his at last who says it best.
James Russell Lowell
If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentleman he may pronounce as he pleases.
George Bernard Shaw
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
James Russell Lowell
A soldier is an anachronism of which we must get rid.
George Bernard Shaw
There are four varieties in society the lovers the ambitious observers and fools. The fools are the happiest.
Hippolyte Taine
Etiquette means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely essential.
Will Cuppy
The public has a taste for supping with the great.
Ulick O'Connor
Englishmen never will be slaves they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do.
George Bernard Shaw
They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three.
James Russell Lowell
Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought.
William Hazlitt
The great artist and thinker are the simplifiers.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply to enjoy simply to think freely to risk life to be needed.
Storm Jameson