Quotes by Critics - Page 8

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 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
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
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
Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.
Joseph Wood Krutch
Before the war and especially before the Boer War it was summer all the year round.
George Orwell
They sicken of the calm who know the storm.
Dorothy Parker
If we seek the pleasures of love passion should be occasional and common sense continual.
Robertson Davies
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia: To mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
H.L. Mencken
Our hearts were drunk with a beauty our eyes could never see.
George W. Russell
Man becomes man only by the intelligence but he is man only by the heart.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Parentage is a very important profession but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interests of the Children.
George Bernard Shaw
The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parents' first duty.
George Bernard Shaw
Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy.
William Hazlitt
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
Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good fortune.
William Hazlitt
The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
George Bernard Shaw
I hate myself on the screen. I want to die ... my voice is either too high or too gravelly. I want to dive under the carpet.... I'd love to be tall and willowy ... I'm short.
Elizabeth Taylor
I don't like my voice. I don't like the way I look. I don't like the way I move. I don't like the way I act. I mean period. So you know I don't like myself.
Elizabeth Taylor
When you're fifty you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity-but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.
Joyce Carol Oates
We love in others what we lack ourselves and would be everything but what we are.
R. H. Stoddard
Utter originality is of course out of the question.
Ezra Pound
Those who are fond of setting things to rights have no great objection to setting them wrong.
William Hazlitt
Our laws make law impossible our liberties destroy all freedom our property is organized robbery our morality an impudent hypocrisy our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes our power wielded by cowards and weaklings and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons.
George Bernard Shaw
Opportunity rarely knocks until you are ready. And few people have ever been really ready without receiving opportunity's call.
Channing Pollock
Stiff in opinion always in the wrong.
John Dryden
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.
James Russell Lowell
The pressure of public opinion is like the pressure of the atmosphere you can't see it - but all the same it is sixteen pounds to the square inch.
James Russell Lowell
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
James Russell Lowell
The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack.
H.L. Mencken
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
George Bernard Shaw
Wit is the salt of conversation not the food.
William Hazlitt
A little space of time before time expires a little way of breath.
Algernon Swinburne
To learn new habits is everything for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
One day with life and heart is more than time enough to find a world.
James Russell Lowell
A day's work is a day's work neither more nor less and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance a night's repose and due leisure whether he be painter or ploughman.
George Bernard Shaw
Present joys are more to flesh and blood Than the dull prospect of a distant good.
John Dryden
Death accompanies us at every step and enables us to use those moments when life smiles at us to feel more deeply the sweetness of life. The more certain the end the more tempting the minute.
Theodore Fontane
Time wasted is a theft from God.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
I wish I could stand on a busy corner hat in hand and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
Bernard Berenson
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
Robertson Davies
We attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter we persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them.
William Hazlitt
There is no wisdom equal to that which comes after the event.
Geraldine Jewsbury
I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.
Margaret Fuller
I'm a little wounded but I am not slain I will lay me down to bleed a while. Then I'll rise and fight again.
John Dryden
Freedom of the press in Britain is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to.
Hannen Swaffer
Deep experience is never peaceful.
Henry James
A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.
George Bernard Shaw
For Art may err but Nature cannot miss.
John Dryden
When a man wantonly destroys a work of man we call him a vandal when a man destroys one of the works of God we call him a sportsman.
Joseph Wood Krutch
Hell is full of musical amateurs.
George Bernard Shaw
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.
Leigh Hunt
Opera in English is in the main just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
H.L. Mencken