Quotes by Critics - Page 57

Sometimes happiness consists of finding the right balance of misery.
Orson Scott Card
The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired.
George Bernard Shaw
It will hurt." said Petra. "But let's make the most of what we have, and not let future pain ruin present happiness.
Orson Scott Card
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
George Bernard Shaw
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
Robertson Davies
Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.
Orson Scott Card
Joy came always after pain.
Guillaume Apollinaire
We have to go. I'm almost happy here.
Orson Scott Card
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H.L. Mencken
Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.
Orson Scott Card
If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.
Dorothy Parker
I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries.
Thomas Mallon
Genius is the power of lighting one's own fire!
John Forster
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike
It's time to start living the life you've imagined.
Henry James
Fatherhood to us was an act of passion, soon forgot; but not to Orem ap Avonap. Never guessing that the blond and happy farmer was no blood of his, Orem had taken a part of that simple man into himself and saved it for this time. At any time in the Palace he might run by, Youth on this shoulders or, as time went by, toddling along behind.
Orson Scott Card
Really to believe in human nature while striving to know the thousand forces that warp it from its ideal development-to call for and expect much from men and women, and not to be disappointed and embittered if they fall short- to try to do good with people rather than to them- this is my religion on its human side. And if God exists, I think that he must be in the warm sun, in the kindly actions of the people we know and read of, in the beautiful things of art and nature, and in the closeness of friendships.
Randolph Bourne
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals.
George Orwell
The years I have squandered in puerile excitement, in going hither and thither, in seeking to force nature and time, I ought to have spent in solitude and meditation, in endeavoring to make myself worthy of being loved.
Théophile Gautier
I see at last that all the knowledgeI wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darknessAnd we call it wisdom. It is pain.
Randall Jarrell
But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory--humorous, poignant, humane allegory--disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge.
Robertson Davies
Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.
George Orwell
all appears to change when we change
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
I am quite a wise old bird, but I am no desert hermit who can only prophesy when his guts are knotted with hunger. I am deep in the old man’s puzzle, trying to link the wisdom of the body with the wisdom of the spirit until the two are one.
Robertson Davies
But I give you my word, in the entire book there is nothing that cannot be said aloud in mixed company. And there is, also, nothing that makes you a bit the wiser. I wonder--oh, what will you think of me--if those two statements do not verge upon the synonymous.
Dorothy Parker
It is not what he has, nor even what he does, which directly expresses the worth of a man, but what he is.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.
Ludwig Börne
Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal.
Henry James
We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
H.L. Mencken
The wise are not wise because they make no mistakes. They are wise because they correct their mistakes as soon as they recognize them.
Orson Scott Card
I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
Hippolyte Taine
You don't want to have any pity on these here tramps – scum, they are. You don't want to judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They're scum, just scum.' It was interesting to see the subtle way in which he disassociated himself from 'these here tramps'. He had been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. I imagine there are quite a lot of tramps who thank God they are not tramps. They are like the trippers who say such cutting things about trippers.
George Orwell
[God] is a kind of perpetual critique of instrumental reason.
Terry Eagleton
Le hasard, c'est peut-être le pseudonyme de Dieu quand il ne veut pas signer.
Théophile Gautier
We are no longer so lacking in fantasy as to uphold the existence of a god.
Carl Einstein
God is angry with man. Unless we believe and repent we shall all be damned. It is impossible, indeed, for its advocates even to say this without instantly contradicting themselves. Their doctrine frightens them. They explain in various ways that a great many people will be saved without believing, and that eternal damnation is not eternal nor damnation.
Leslie Stephen
God, A Poem 'I didn't exist at Creation, I didn't exist at the Flood, And I won't be around for SalvationTo sort out the sheep from the cud-'Or whatever the phrase is. The fact isIn soteriological termsI'm a crude existential malpracticeAnd you are a diet of worms
James Fenton
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: 'You atheist?'"Kingsley Amis: 'Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him.
Kingsley Amis
With life. Rooter says that life is how God gives purpose to the universe.
Orson Scott Card
For in Paris, whenever God puts a pretty woman there (the streets), the Devil, in reply, immediately puts a fool to keep her.
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.
George Bernard Shaw
If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot and a bounder.
H.L. Mencken
Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing—a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.
George Bernard Shaw
A writer inevitably - and less directly this applies to all the arts - about contemporary events, and his impulse is to tell what he believes to be truth. But no government, no big organisation, will pay for the truth.
George Orwell
Perhaps a physicist would know at once why this whole idea was absurd. But then, perhaps a physicist would be so locked into the consensus of his scientific community that it would be harder for him to accept an idea that transformed the meaning of everything he knew. Even if it were true.
Orson Scott Card
The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.
George Bernard Shaw
As long as he deceived himself about the truth, he could blame fortune and have confidence in the future. Now the clouds of madness were closing round his mind.
Hermann Bahr
But it was not the boyish grin she had known when he bounded along the low-gravity inner corridors of Battle School. This smile had weariness in it, and old fears long mastered but still present. It was the smile of wisdom.
Orson Scott Card
America's intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They're all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to be open-minded and tolerant of the things they believe, but God forbid they should ever concede, even for a moment, that someone who disagrees with them might have some fingerhold of truth.
Orson Scott Card
Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.
Kingsley Amis
What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never know why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even know themselves. Nobody understands anybody.
Orson Scott Card
. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.
Joyce Carol Oates
She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.
Henry James
A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.
Orson Scott Card
When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.
Orson Scott Card
It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it—to admit this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse.
H.L. Mencken
The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
Rémy de Gourmont
It is the tragedy of a distinguished mind and a generous nature that have gone unappreciated in a conventional, unimaginative world. A victim of men's incomprehension of women, a symptom of women's mistrust of men.
Francis Wyndham
In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.
George Orwell
The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.
George Orwell