English Critic Quotations

Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas.

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.

Gracefulness has been defined to be the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.

Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring.

I should like to spend the whole of my life in traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.

Some persons make promises for the pleasure of breaking them.

A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.

For him, indeed, human life is, in the first instance, only an additional, and as it were incidental grace, upon this expressive landscape.

No truly great man ever thought himself so.

I like a friend better for having faults that one can talk about.

In France particularly, under the strong and brilliant government of Francis I, there was an outburst of original and vital writing.

If you think you can win, you can. Faith is necessary to victory.

A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one they shew one another off to the best advantage.