Quotes by Critics - Page 4

Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.
James Russell Lowell
A man must be able to cut a knot for everything cannot be untied he must know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which it is enwrapped for everything cannot be equally considered in a word he must be able to simplify his duties his business and his life.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated he forgets truths which are too simple.
Dame Rebecca West
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
George Bernard Shaw
The most silent people are generally those who think most highly of themselves.
William Hazlitt
I believe in the discipline of silence and could talk for hours about it.
George Bernard Shaw
We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us ashamed of ourselves of our relatives of our incomes of our accents of our opinion of our experience just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.
George Bernard Shaw
The same people who can deny others everything are famous for refusing themselves nothing.
Leigh Hunt
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. The people who get on in this world are they who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them make them.
George Bernard Shaw
Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing. They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.
Louis Kronenberger
Talk uses up ideas. ... Once I have spoken them aloud they are lost to me dissipated into the noisy air like smoke. Only if I bury them like bulbs in the rich soil of silence do they grow.
Doris Grumbach
Self-control is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive.
George Bernard Shaw
The way in which we think of ourselves has everything to do with how our world sees us.
Arlene Raven
They conquer who believe they can.
John Dryden
As is our confidence so is our capacity.
William Hazlitt
In our society those who are in reality superior in intelligence can be accepted by their fellows only if they pretend they are not.
Marya Mannes
Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved.
Margaret Fuller
Calm self-confidence is as far from conceit as the desire to earn a decent living is remote from greed.
Channing Pollock
Let a man's talents or virtues be what they may he will only feel satisfaction in his society as he is satisfied in himself.
William Hazlitt
Those people who are uncomfortable in themselves are disagreeable to others.
William Hazlitt
Learn to ... be what you are and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Genius is expansive irresistible and irresistibly expansive. If it is in you no cords can confine it.
Gail Hamilton
Let a man's talents or virtues be what they may he will only feel satisfaction as he is satisfied in himself.
William Hazlitt
When people say: she's got everything I've only one answer: I haven't had tomorrow.
Elizabeth Taylor
Whatever you may be sure of be sure of this - that you are dreadfully like other people.
James Russell Lowell
Individualism is rather like innocence there must be something unconscious about it.
Louis Kronenberger
I shall stay the way I am Because I do not give a damn.
Dorothy Parker
A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the not-self that there is no self left to die.
Bernard Berenson
Self-respecting people do not care to peep at their reflections in unexpected mirrors or to see themselves as others see them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear-fear of the unknown the complex the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.
H.L. Mencken
Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament not of income.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Security depends not so much upon how much you have as upon how much you can do without.
Joseph Wood Krutch
Science is the systematic classification of experience.
George Henry Lewes
Though many have tried no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science which can do so much cannot decide what it ought to do.
Joseph Wood Krutch
In science all facts no matter how trivial or banal enjoy democratic equality.
Mary McCarthy
There is a pleasure sure In being mad which none but madmen know!
John Dryden
If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning we may study his commentators.
William Hazlitt
Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.
William Hazlitt
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
George Bernard Shaw
The principle of procrastinated rape is said to be the ruling one in all the great bestsellers.
V.S. Pritchett
There was never a place for her in the ranks of the terrible slow army of the cautious. She ran ahead where there were no paths.
Dorothy Parker
We may by our excessive prudence squeeze out of the life we are guarding so anxiously all the adventurous quality that makes it worth living.
Randolph Bourne
I feel very adventurous. There are so many doors to be opened and I'm not afraid to look behind them.
Elizabeth Taylor
This nation was built by men who took risks-pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness business men who were not afraid of failure scientists who were not afraid of the truth thinkers who were not afraid of progress dreamers who were not afraid of action.
Brooks Atkinson
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
Every person is responsible for all the good within the scope of his abilities and for no more.
Gail Hamilton
A man must be obedient to the promptings of his innermost heart.
Robertson Davies
We had as lief not be as not be ourselves.
William Hazlitt
No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself
James Russell Lowell
Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound why try to look like a Pekingese?
Edith Sitwell
If you go to heaven without being naturally qualified for it you will not enjoy it there.
George Bernard Shaw
To feel that one has a place in life solves half the problem of contentment.
George E. Woodberry
It is essential to the triumph of reform that it shall never succeed.
William Hazlitt
Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.
George Bernard Shaw
Big Brother is watching you.
George Orwell
The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work stretch out in the sun and scratch himself.
H.L. Mencken
Repentance is but want of power to sin.
John Dryden
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
H.L. Mencken
A Puritan is a person who lives in the fear that someone somewhere may be having a good time.
H.L. Mencken
To all things clergic I am allergic.
Alexander Woollcott