Quotes by Critics - Page 9

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
John Updike
From Mozart I learnt to say important things in a conversational way.
George Bernard Shaw
By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept Remembering thee.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
As long as I have a want I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
George Bernard Shaw
As long as I have a want I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
George Bernard Shaw
What humbugs we are who pretend to live for Beauty and never see the Dawn!
Logan Pearsall Smith
Always begin anew with the day just as nature does. It is one of the sensible things that nature does.
George E. Woodberry
Each day the world is born anew for him who takes it rightly.
James Russell Lowell
Morality is not respectability.
George Bernard Shaw
Most people sell their souls and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Those only deserve a monument who do not need one.
William Hazlitt
An election is a moral horror as bad as a battle except for the blood a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
George Bernard Shaw
An improper mind is a perpetual feast.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong and that 99% of them are wrong.
H.L. Mencken
One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame we have killed off so much real shame as well.
Louis Kronenberger
And what is so rare as a day in June? Then if ever come perfect days Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune And over it softly her warm ear lays.
James Russell Lowell
The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people.
Logan Pearsall Smith
But then one is always excited by descriptions of money changing hands. It's much more fundamental than sex.
Nigel Dennis
Let us be of good cheer however remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.
James Russell Lowell
A woman who is found without her veil in some regions of Islam will it is reported raise her skirt to cover her face.
Raymond Mortimer
He and I had an office so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.
Dorothy Parker
The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.
H.L. Mencken
Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing they marry later. For another thing they die earlier.
H.L. Mencken
Women and elephants never forget.
Dorothy Parker
If after I depart this vale you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
H.L. Mencken
What is forgiven is usually well remembered.
Louis Dudek
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
George Bernard Shaw
I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile.
George Bernard Shaw
You don't learn to hold your own by standing on guard but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
The whole world is strewn with snares traps gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women.
George Bernard Shaw
Marriage is a great institution and no family should be without it.
Channing Pollock
No matter how happily a woman may be married it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not.
H.L. Mencken
Henry VIII had so many wives because his dynastic sense was very strong whenever he saw a maid of honour.
Will Cuppy
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant of a teacher and a learner.
John Updike
As a general thing people marry most happily with their own kind. The trouble lies in the fact that people usually marry at an age when they do not really know what their own kind is.
Robertson Davies
Married women are kept women and they are beginning to find it out.
Logan Pearsall Smith
His tribe were God Almighty's gentlemen.
John Dryden
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 ought to be.
William Hazlitt
The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else.
George Bernard Shaw
The worst cynicism a belief in luck.
Joyce Carol Oates
It is a madness to make fortune the mistress of events because in herself she is nothing but is ruled by prudence.
John Dryden
Fortune is the rod of the weak and the staff of the brave.
James Russell Lowell
The fickleness of the woman I love is equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
George Bernard Shaw
Man begins by loving love and ends by loving a woman. Woman begins by loving a man and ends by loving love.
Rémy de Gourmont
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
George Bernard Shaw
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
H.L. Mencken
It is assumed that the woman must wait motionless until she is wooed. That is how the spider waits for the fly.
George Bernard Shaw
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
George Bernard Shaw
A novel is a static thing that one moves through a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.
Kenneth Tynan
Chaucer I confess is a rough diamond and must be polished e'er he shines.
John Dryden
Literature is mostly about sex and not much about having children and life is the other way around.
David Lodge
The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
Randall Jarrell
We are most alive when we're in love.
John Updike
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.
Clive James
Let us be of good cheer remembering that misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.
James Russell Lowell
None but those who are happy in themselves can make others so.
William Hazlitt
All the things I really like to do are either immoral illegal or fattening.
Alexander Woollcott
All of life is more or less what the French would call s'imposer - to be able to create one's own terms for what one does.
Kenneth Tynan
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives but on balance life is suffering and only the very sound or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
George Orwell
Life is seldom as unendurable as to judge by the facts it logically ought to be.
Brooks Atkinson