Famous quotes by Critics

"When Louis XIV assumed the reins of government, France suddenly and wonderfully came to her maturity; it was as if the whole nation had burst into splendid flower"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"How far the existence of the Academy has influenced French literature, either for good or for evil, is an extremely dubious question"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes straight from the Latin"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"Discretion is not the better part of biography"

Lytton Strachey, Critic

"They make glorious shipwreck who are lost in seeking worlds"

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Critic

"Absolute truth belongs to Thee alone"

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Critic

"One can drink too much, but one never drinks enough"

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Critic

"Would that we could at once paint with the eyes! In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost!"

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Critic

"If some things don't make you lose your sense of reason, then you have none to lose"

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Critic

"He who doesn't lose his wits over certain things has no wits to lose"

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Critic

"Yet Aristotle's excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon"

Irving Babbitt, Critic

"To harmonize the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so important, withal, that nations have perished from their failure to achieve it"

Irving Babbitt, Critic

"If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism"

Irving Babbitt, Critic

"Act strenuously, would appear to be our faith, and right thinking will take care of itself"

Irving Babbitt, Critic

"Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words"

Northrop Frye, Critic

"Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards"

Irving Babbitt, Critic

"A man needs to look, not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog"

Irving Babbitt, Critic

"A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic about its practice"

Irving Babbitt, Critic

"Where there is a will, there is a way. If there is a chance in a million that you can do something, anything, to keep what you want from ending, do it. Pry the door open or, if need be, wedge your foot in that door and keep it open"

Pauline Kael, Critic

"Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. The Indians should have called him 'Plays with Camera.'"

Pauline Kael, Critic

"It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have the patience to make art"

Pauline Kael, Critic

"In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising"

Pauline Kael, Critic

"The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones"

Northrop Frye, Critic

"In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented"

Northrop Frye, Critic

"Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher"

Pauline Kael, Critic

"Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object"

Northrop Frye, Critic

"Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status"

Northrop Frye, Critic

"The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego"

Northrop Frye, Critic

"The ultimate binding element in the medieval order was subordination to the divine will and its earthly representatives, notably the Pope"

Irving Babbitt, Critic

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