Quotes by Critics - Page 5

Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.
George Bernard Shaw
Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.
H.L. Mencken
Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world but you must get at a man through his own religion not through yours.
George Bernard Shaw
He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the Church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
Kingsley Amis
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton you may as well make it dance.
George Bernard Shaw
What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities of having a patient but restless mind of sacrificing one's ease or vanity of uniting a love of detail to foresight and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully.
Charles Victor Cherbuliez
Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
George Orwell
Men expect too much do too little.
Allen Tate
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
If we are to survive on this planet there must be compromises.
Storm Jameson
We [Americans] cheerfully assume that in some mystic way love conquers all that good outweighs evil in the just balances of the universe and that at the eleventh hour something gloriously triumphant will prevent the worst before it happens.
Brooks Atkinson
There are philosophies which are unendurable not because men are cowards but because they are men.
Ludwig Lewisohn
I don't know much about being a millionaire but I'll bet I'd be darling at it.
Dorothy Parker
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
Dorothy Parker
The public have neither shame nor gratitude.
William Hazlitt
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
A great devotee of the gospel of getting on.
George Bernard Shaw
A thousand things advance nine hundred and ninety-nine retreat that is progress.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
H.L. Mencken
Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy for it means pushing back a boundary-line and adding to one's liberty.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Pride and weakness are Siamese twins.
James Russell Lowell
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
George Bernard Shaw
The truly proud man is satisfied with his own good opinion and does not seek to make converts to it.
William Hazlitt
Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
William Hazlitt
One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.
H.L. Mencken
Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest violence.
Lord Francis Jeffrey
Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room.
William Hazlitt
How it infuriates a bigot when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions!
Logan Pearsall Smith
I who still pray at morning and at eve Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed Thrice stirred below conscious self Have felt that perfect disenthrallment which is God.
James Russell Lowell
Most people do not pray they only beg.
George Bernard Shaw
What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattery.
George Bernard Shaw
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell
Liberal - a power worshipper without power.
George Orwell
Patience and gentleness is power.
Leigh Hunt
Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.
George Bernard Shaw
This is one of the bitter curses of poverty: it leaves no right to be generous.
George Gissing
The more we do the more we can do the more busy we are the more leisure we have.
William Hazlitt
I am dying but otherwise I am quite well.
Edith Sitwell
Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which makes it certain that what they dread shall happen.
Dame Rebecca West
The process of maturing is an art to be learned an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are and if it is good it is better than your youth.
Marya Mannes
True revolutions ... restore more than they destroy.
Louise Bogan
Damned Neuters in their Middle way of Steering Are neither Fish nor Flesh nor good Red Herring.
John Dryden
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of polities'. All issues are political issues.
George Orwell
Politics is not a good location or a vocation for anyone lazy thin-skinned or lacking a sense of humour.
John Bailey
A ginooine statesman should be on his guard if he must hev beliefs not to b'lieve 'em too hard.
James Russell Lowell
He knows nothing he thinks he knows everything - that clearly points to a political career.
George Bernard Shaw
Ah men do not know how much strength is in poise that he goes the farthest who goes far enough.
James Russell Lowell
Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm and behave as outrageously as the world will let them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
A good poet is someone who manages in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning five or six times.
Randall Jarrell
Villon our sad bad glad mad brother's name.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
The philosopher is Nature's pilot - and there you have our difference to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.
George Bernard Shaw
The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.
George Bernard Shaw
The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.
Brooks Atkinson
Where's the man could ease the heart Like a satin gown?
Dorothy Parker
A pessimist? A man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself and hates them for it.
George Bernard Shaw
But Shelley had a hyperthyroid face.
John C. Squire
Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.
H.L. Mencken
A concern with the perfectibility of mankind is always a symptom of thwarted or perverted development.
Hugh Kingsmill
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
George Orwell