Famous quotes by Critics

Brooks Atkinson, Critic

"There is no joy so great as that of reporting that a good play has come to town"

Brooks Atkinson, Critic

"People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know"

Brooks Atkinson, Critic

"We all agree now - by "we" I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves"

Clive Bell, Critic

"Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age"

Clive Bell, Critic

"Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open"

Clive Bell, Critic

"All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art"

Clive Bell, Critic

"We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it"

Clive Bell, Critic

"Comfort came in with the middle classes"

Clive Bell, Critic

"Do not mistake a crowd of big wage-earners for the leisure class"

Clive Bell, Critic

"The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy"

Clive Bell, Critic

"A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind"

Clive Bell, Critic

"It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal"

Clive Bell, Critic

"I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic"

Clive Bell, Critic

"In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"The stability and peace which seemed to be so firmly established by the brilliant monarchy of Francis I vanished with the terrible outbreak of the Wars of Religion"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"Let the devil catch you but by a single hair, and you are his forever"

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Critic

"For me, the greatest beauty always lies in the greatest clarity"

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Critic

"A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes"

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Critic

"When the French nation gradually came into existence among the ruins of the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time slowly evolved"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"Though, with the ascendancy of Louis, the political power of the nobles finally came to an end, France remained, in the whole complexion of her social life, completely aristocratic"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"The old interests of aristocracy - the romance of action, the exalted passions of chivalry and war - faded into the background, and their place was taken by the refined and intimate pursuits of peace and civilization"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"The amateur is very rare in French literature - as rare as he is common in our own"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"Englishmen have always loved Moliere"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"Unlike the majority of the writers of his age, La Rochefoucauld was an aristocrat; and this fact gives a peculiar tone to his work"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"The genius of the French language, descended from its single Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction - in simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"During this earlier period of his activity, Voltaire seems to have been trying - half unconsciously, perhaps - to discover and to express the fundamental quality of his genius"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

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