"Critic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... say, so pray God to keep you, and give me patience to bear all the ill that will be spoken of me by more than one subtle and starched critic. Vale. ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... is represented in the first (or Matthew's) Gospel, and by that alone, as citing Daniel by name. It was this text that so sorely, but I think very unnecessarily, perplexed and gravelled Bentley, who was too profound a scholar and too acute a critic to admit the genuineness of the whole ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... beautiful Miranda, and her husband, a celebrated English man of letters; a German professor of biology; a young Milanese gentleman, whom we called Edoardo; and myself. Edoardo and the professor had joined us just before the ballet. I had occupied a seat behind Miranda and my friend the critic from the commencement. We had indeed dined together first at their hotel, the Rebecchino; and they now proposed that we should all adjourn together there on foot for supper. From the Scala Theatre to the Rebecchino is a ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... or social philosophy. And one eminent testimony to its merit I myself am able to allege, viz., Wordsworth's. Singular enough it seems, that he who read so very little of modern literature, in fact, next to nothing, should be the sole critic and reporter whom I have happened to meet upon Mrs. Lee's work. But so it was: accident had thrown the book in his way during one of his annual visits to London, and a second time at Lowther Castle. He ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... me now, of course, but I don't regard good-natured raillery. I am sure I should not enjoy poetry as I do were I a better critic. I love flowers far more than many who understand botany as a science, and pull them to ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... I was blessed with a hearer the like of whom I shall never get again. He had so inordinate a capacity for being pleased as to have utterly disqualified him for the post of critic in any of our monthly Reviews. The old man was like a perfectly ripe Alfonso mango—not a trace of acid or coarse fibre in his composition. His tender clean-shaven face was rounded off by an all-pervading baldness; there was ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... literature I can say nothing—lacking a guidance of a competent critic or a knowledge of the language—except that it is ambitious and aspiring. But it can hardly be expected that a language which is, after all, but a dialect of Russian should ever produce a great literature. The Bulgarian national pride is so strong that probably ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... he was Edmund Lushington, the distinguished critic and reviewer, before whom authors trembled and were afraid. It was absurd that he should feel too hot because a mere girl had said something smart and disagreeable. In fact, what she had said was little short of an ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... years ago, and from the outset he showed a fatherly interest in me—an interest which this quaking stripling of an organist appreciated, I can assure you. Being one of the pillars of St. Luke's—the church I play at, you remember—and an esteemed musical critic withal, his hearty approval of me as a performer was an ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... weakness as in a glittering garment. That ironical smile, worn through so many years, had gradually changed the lines of her face, and when she looked in the mirror she saw not herself, but the scathing critic, the amused observer and satirist ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... It was impossible. Had he been a young man, with some acquaintance with life, she thought it would not have been so hard; or had he been a mere child, to whom she could have said that Theo was to be his new papa. But ten; a judge and a critic; a creature who knew so much and so little. Half a dozen times she cleared her throat to begin, to lead the conversation back to Theo, to make some attempt at disclosure: but another look at his face chilled ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... fairness or justice. The question lies between the eternal and holy verities of spiritual science or religious science and the conscience of the inquirer. The poor, illiterate, and obscure people who exhibit for a living whatever capacity they may have, have nothing to do with it. Would our lady critic select a cheap sign painter to represent the beauty and glory of art, or the exhibitors of laughing gas to illustrate the science of Sir Humphrey Davy, or the performances of an illiterate quack to illustrate the dignity ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... views did not entirely agree. A white spot is merely a storm-centre passing round and round the planet, the wind running a little ahead of the surface, which accounts for its rapid rotation compared with the red spot, which is a fixture. A critic may say we have no such winds on earth; to which I reply, that winds on a planet of Jupiter's size, with its rate of rotation—though it is 480,000,000 miles from the sun and the internal heat is so near the surface—and with land and water arranged as they ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... individooal," sed he, "with Hyacinthian curls, and his eye in a fine frenzy rollin! That's the great art critic, who lays down the lor for ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 7 • Charles Farrar Browne
... After you found me, or rather I found you—you, the critic, the arbiter of the greenroom, the highly-organised do-nothings—teaching others how to do nothing most gracefully; the would-be Goethe who must, for the sake of his own self-development, try experiments on every weak woman whom he met. And I, the new phenomenon, whom you ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... to me, sir; I am a poor critic of such matters, but I should think it a masterpiece ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... "'The critic eye—that microscope of wit Sees hairs and pores, examines bit by bit, How parts relate to parts, or they to whole The body's harmony, the beaming soul, Are things which Kuster, Burmann, Wasse, shall see, When man's whole frame is obvious ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... proof of immortality." Enthusiasm must permeate it, but what it is that inspires an art-effort is not easily determined much less classified. The word "inspire" is used here in the sense of cause rather than effect. A critic may say that a certain movement is not inspired. But that may be a matter of taste—perhaps the most inspired music sounds the least so—to the critic. A true inspiration may lack a true expression unless it is assumed that if an inspiration is not true enough to produce ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... scholars learn many long lessons. Wealthy merchants own large ships. The heavy ships bear large burdens; the lighter ships carry less burdens. Just poets use figurative language. Ungrammatical expressions offend a true critic's ear. Weak critics magnify trifling errors. No composition is perfect. The rabble was tumultuous. The late-washed grass looks green. Shady trees form a delightful arbor. The setting sun makes a beautiful appearance; the variegated ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... was dead, as well as his three elder brothers; the youngest, the critic, outlived them all, and that was as it should be, for thus he had the last word, which to him was a matter of the greatest importance. "He had plenty of brains," folk said. Now his hour had struck, he died, and his soul sought the gates of heaven. There it stood ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... date, and of fragments torn from the context of a letter which, in its complete form, has never till now been published. Where positive and published information exists, it has not always come within the range of the critic's researches; had it done so, he would have taken the information into account, but he does not. Of the existence of Scott's "first copy" of the ballad in manuscript our critic seems never to have ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... at $102,345," went on the reading voice, and again the interrupting critic remarked: "Which, you see, we may regard as very significant, since it both obviously and inferably demonstrates that the telegraph company and the poolrooms are ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... waste In critic peep or cynic bark, Quarrel or reprimand: 'T will soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... herself, and greatly increased her resentment towards the one who had already wounded her vanity—the most vulnerable and sensitive trait in her character. The flush that deepened so suddenly upon her face was unmistakably that of anger. She promptly turned her back upon her critic, nor did she look towards him again until the close of the evening. That his words and manner rankled in her memory, however, was proved by a slightly preoccupied manner, followed by fits of gayety not altogether ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... Johnson's life of Pope (Lives of the Poets, ed. Birkbeck Hill, III, 227). Even the heroic couplets of his poem on "Poetry" aim rather at pseudo-Pindaric diffuseness than at epigrammatic concentration of statement. As a critic Cobb deserves attention in spite of his mediocrity, or even because of it. He helps to fill out the picture of the literary London of his time, and his opinions and tastes provide valuable side-lights on such greater men as Dennis, Addison, ...
— Discourse on Criticism and of Poetry (1707) - From Poems On Several Occasions (1707) • Samuel Cobb
... austere pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes he carefully explained to his readers that d'Annunzio's lewdness must not be confused with the obscenities of Zola, whereat Ouida protested that they were alike in their complacent preoccupation with mere filth. The Frenchman is the sounder critic, it must be said, for while d'Annunzio frequently parallels some of the most unclean—in the literal, not the moral sense—scenes and incidents in Zola, his attitude about sex is as unlike Zola's as that of the late W. D. Howells. Only in "Nana" did Zola describe ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... the game unscorched. But she felt assured that other women, in similar circumstances, had engaged in much the same encounter with Cyrus Redgrave; and could it be imagined that Sibyl Carnaby was one of them—Sibyl, the woman of culture, of high principle, the critic of society—Sibyl, to whom she had so long paid homage, as to one of the chosen of her sex? That Redgrave might approach Sibyl with lawless thought, she could well believe, and such a possibility excited her indignation; that Sibyl would meet him on his own terms, ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... and hung conspicuously. There were always small groups before it, for it created something like the uproar that Manet's "Olympia" had raised in its time. Peter learned from one critic that his technique was magnificent, his picture a masterpiece of psychology and of portraiture, and that if he kept on he'd soon be one of the Immortals. He learned from another that while he undoubtedly had technique, his ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... perhaps Charles Edward—if that young man's artistic ability had been equal to his sense of it there would have been less danger in taking him into the factory. Or probably Maria, with her great head for business—oh, Maria, I grant you, is like what the French critic said of the ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... yet undertaken to treat the Inquisition from this objective standpoint. In the seventeenth century, a scholarly priest, Jacques Marsollier, canon of the Uzes, published at Cologne (Paris), in 1693, a Histoire de l'Inquisition et de son Origine. But his work, as a critic has pointed out, is "not so much a history of the Inquisition, as a thesis written with a strong Gallican bias, which details with evident delight the cruelties of the Holy Office." The illustrations are taken from Philip Limborch's ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... Faithful to his vow, he had not been to see little Fanny. He was trying to drive her from his mind by occupation, or other mental excitement. He labored, though not to much profit, incessantly in his rooms; and, in his capacity of critic for the "Pall Mall Gazette," made woeful and savage onslaught on a poem and a romance which came before him for judgment. These authors slain, he went to dine alone at the lonely club of the Polyanthus, where the vast solitudes frightened ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Even that austere critic, Scaliger, made the principles of it so far his concern, that he was able personally to satisfy an Emperor's curiosity, as to the nature and meaning of the Pirrhic dance, by ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... most dear to him. No one would venture to call the successful merchant a Visionary; and even his brother owns that "the old fellow has got more brains, after all, by Jove! than he ever gave him credit for." Yet, as the same critic, and others of his calibre, often say of him, "He has some remarkably queer notions. There's no making him out,—he is so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... An able critic in the "Saturday Review" of May 10, 1902, has charged me with neglecting to say that the French left wing (Foy's and Bachelu's divisions) supported the French cavalry at the close of the great charges. I stated (p. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Ivanov was born in 1866. A poet of great mastery and a refined critic, his thought, is steeped in hellenism and in the most ...
— The Shield • Various
... thought of George. Bob Bistre, the eldest, was my apprentice, and must become famous in consequence; and when he was twenty-five years old, and money became no object to me (through the purchase by a great art critic of the very worst picture I ever painted; half of it, in fact, was Bob's!), I gave the boy choice of our autumn trip to California, or ...
— George Bowring - A Tale Of Cader Idris - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... Farmer!—but my oratory begins to wax faint. For this reason I cannot speak with justice of the friend and fellow-critic of Farmer—GEORGE STEEVENS[409]—of Shakspearian renown! The Library of this extraordinary critic and collector was sold by auction in the year 1800; and, being formed rather after the model of Mason's, than of Farmer's, it was rich to an excess in choice and ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... represented it as humble, penitent, and purified. Two of these gentlemen were High-Church, and he noticed their peculiarities: one was a certain half-musical monotony in speaking which might be called by a severe critic sing-song. Perhaps they thought the intoning of the service in a cathedral could be transferred with ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... by a profound critic of Shakespeare, and it occurs to me as very appropriate in this connection, that the spirit which held the woe of Lear and the tragedy of "Hamlet" would have broken had it not also had the humor of the "Merry Wives of Windsor" and the merriment of the "Midsummer ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... inclined to send that second self to the devil, that self which does not permit yielding to any sensation, but is always there, searching, criticising every action, feeling, delight, or passion. "Know thyself" may be a wise maxim, but to carry about one's self an ever watchful critic deadens the feeling, dividing as it were your soul in two parts. To exist in a state of mind like this is about as easy as for the bird to fly with one wing. Besides, selfconsciousness too much developed weakens the power of action. But for this, Hamlet would have made a hole in his uncle ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... read the fiery denunciations of the clergy's evil practices, which may be found in the records of nearly every age, we must not forget that the critic is always prone to take the good for granted and to dwell upon the evil. This is particularly true in dealing with a great religious institution, where corruption is especially shocking. One wicked bishop, or one form of oppression or immorality among ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... determined, awoke wild applause. He preserved his power of stirring the people whenever he spoke, but his speech was not as racy and clear as it had been. "This was one of the occasions," to quote from a distinguished critic of Toombs, "when the almost extinct volcano glowed again with its wonted fires—when the ivy-mantled keep of the crumbling castle resumed its pristine defiance with deep-toned culverin and ponderous mace; when, amid the colossal fragments of ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... and once before mature people. The Griffin and the Minor Canon is a beautiful fairy story lifted from childhood's thought and diction into a mature realm. His humor is plain and simple, cool and keenly calculating. A friendly critic has said of one of his stories, "With a gentle, ceaseless murmur of amusement, and a flickering twinkle of smiles, the story moves steadily on in the calm triumph of its assured and unassailable absurdity, to its logical and ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... asked to give his opinion. The double negative, therefore, should be carefully avoided, for it is insidious and is liable to slip in and the writer remain unconscious of its presence until the eye of the critic ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... Exasperated critic, who has sent for twelve seats, and has been politely refused. "I'd like to abuse it, if there was a chance; but there isn't. The play is really good, and I can't find much fault with the acting. However, I'll pitch ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various
... of these two old pensioners from the high seas, living together in the evening of their days in a narrow court in a London slum, the one paralysed and the other blind; the one a most brilliant and imaginative story-teller, the other a most cautious, modest, tentative, and genial critic. And let us sit between their two chairs for a moment and listen to the moving story of Old Joe, believing it with all the simplicity, if not with all the stupefied, admiration of the little slum children who gaze at the pirate when his chair is moved out into the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... about the absence of all literary qualities in our fiction. We have been judged by Englishmen and Irishmen who do not know our work and by Americans who do know it. We have been appraised at our real worth by Mr. Edward Garnett, who is probably the only English critic competent through sufficient acquaintance to discuss us. Mr. Owen Wister and Mr. Henry Sydnor Harrison have discussed us with each other, and bandied names to and fro rather uncritically. And Mr. Robert Herrick has endeavored to reassure us kindly ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... first time the pipe was removed for a moment. "A critic is one who only exists as such ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... appreciation. He aspires to the title of "Independent," and has described his own position as that of a man sitting on a fence, with clean boots, watching carefully which way he may leap to keep out of the mud. A critic might, without carping, suggest that it is the duty of an earnest man to disregard the bespattering which fidelity to principle often incurs, and that a beaten path to safe place for one's self is not an inspiring or ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... nothing could be stranger than this talk on the dark road with the girl who, too, should be naturally opposed to him. In fact, here at this very spot and at their first meeting she had announced herself as a critic and an enemy. He could smile over that now; she herself probably did smile at the recollection. Yet she was calmly discussing his situation ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... reprisals awaited the extravagant fame of Ronsard. Malherbe, coming in the next generation, legislator of Parnassus, laughed the literary pretensions of Ronsard to scorn. This stern critic of form, such is the story, marked up his copy of Ronsard with notes of censure so many, that a friend of his, seeing the annotated volume, observed, "What here is not marked, will be understood to have been approved by you." Whereupon Malherbe, taking his pen, with ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... she had invited the Parisian critic to her box. It happened at a soiree, where he showed his savage profile among admiring musical lambs. But he was never punctual at musical affairs. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... a number of others, mostly names I did not recollect ever having heard before, and she often used the word "decadent," which she pronounced in the French way and which I did not then understand. Now and then she would quote some critic, or some remark heard from a friend or from her father, and once she dwelt on an argument of her oldest brother, who seemed to be well versed in Russian literature and to have clear-cut opinions on ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Baker sailed from New York another emissary went abroad for the Exposition, J. N. Laurvik, the art critic. A few weeks before Mr. Laurvik had returned from Europe, where he had represented the Fine Arts Department, looking for the work of the artists in those countries that were not to participate officially. At ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... reaching to the roof and carrying off the smoke. And Callimachus, the maker of this lamp, altho he comes behind the first artificers, yet was remarkable for ingenuity, and was the first who perforated stone, and got the name of "Art-Critic," whether his own appellation or ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... for the most fair-minded critic to find in the character of Joseph Smith anything to commend, except an abundance of good-nature which made him personally popular with the body of his followers. He has been credited with power as a leader, ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... dealing with the character of his late ward, had been somewhat too severe. It is difficult, perhaps, to say what amount of misconduct does constitute a scoundrel, or justifies the critic in saying that this or that man is not a gentleman. There be those who affirm that he who owes a debt for goods which he cannot pay is no gentleman, and tradesmen when they cannot get their money are no doubt sometimes inclined to hold that opinion. But ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... critic, scholar and poet, has used the incidents that follow as the subject of one of his most interesting poems. To that poem we will look for a continuation of the story. Arnold alters the story at times to suit the needs ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... continuation, setting forth Beowulf's return home. Last came a theoretical interloper, B, a monk, who interspersed religious sayings of his own, and added the ancient song of the fight with the dragon and the death of Beowulf. The positive critic not only finds all this, but proceeds to point out which passages are old, older, and oldest, where a few lines are from poet A, and where other interpolation is from poet B."—"English Verse and Prose" in "Cassell's Library ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... of HUDIBRAS, has been recently censured for exposing to ridicule the Sir Samuel Luke, under whose roof he dwelt, in the grotesque character of his hero. The knowledge of the critic in our literary history is not curious; he appears to have advanced no further than to have taken up the first opinion he found; but this served for an attempt to blacken the moral character of BUTLER! ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... scarce have failed to hear of Mr. Hyde's familiarity about the house; he might draw conclusions: was it not as well, then, that he should see a letter which put that mystery to rights? and above all since Guest, being a great student and critic of handwriting, would consider the step natural and obliging? The clerk, besides, was a man of counsel; he would scarce read so strange a document without dropping a remark; and by that remark Mr. Utterson ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... tame, with very little knowledge of the finer shades of character," interrupted Mr. Malcolm. "I wonder why you, as a critic, can compare our brilliant modern literature to ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... an eminent critic and poet, born in Fifeshire, Scotland, in 1813. He studied law, and was appointed Professor of Rhetoric in Edinburgh University in 1845, and was closely connected with Blackwood's Magazine for many years. He was a poet of the highest order, and his Execution of Montrose, ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... her lot, and disposed to contrast it egotistically with the slavery of her virtuous sisters. If she complains of it, then you may be sure that her success is below her expectations. A starving lawyer always sees injustice, in the courts. A bad physician is a bitter critic of Ehrlich and Pasteur. And when a suburban clergyman is forced out of his cure by a vestry-room revolution be almost invariably concludes that the sinfulness of man is incurable, and sometimes he even begins to doubt ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... burden, of course, falls on Everyman, and the artist who played this part seemed to me, though I am no dramatic critic, to have caught the atmosphere and the spirit of the play. His performance, indeed, was very wonderful from the moment when he offers Death a thousand boons if only the dread summons may be delayed, to that final tense scene, when, stripped ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... 'that I was a heavy old man thirty years ago. Fifteen years ago I was at the height of my strength. I am beginning to feel now a little more tolerant towards the boy who wrote this than the man who criticised it in 1865; but he was quite right.' The critic of 1865, I may note, is specially hard upon the lad of 1850 for his ignorance of sound utilitarian authorities. He writes against an allusion to Hobbes, 'Ignorant blasphemy of the greatest of English philosophers!' The lad has misstated an argument from ignorance of Bentham and Austin. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the most friendly quotation could hardly be absent from that which was intended to support a hostile view; and the only injustice of which he ever complained, was what he spoke of as falsely condemning him out of his own mouth. He used to say: 'If a critic declares that any poem of mine is unintelligible, the reader may go to it and judge for himself; but, if it is made to appear unintelligible by a passage extracted from it and distorted by misprints, I have no redress.' He also failed to realize those conditions ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... reader, not a record of what men did, but a sense of how they thought and felt about what they did. To give the quality and texture of the state of mind and feeling of an individual or class, to create for the reader the illusion (not DELUSION, O able Critic!) of the intellectual atmosphere of past times, I have as a matter of course introduced many quotations; but I have also ventured to resort frequently to the literary device (this, I know, gives the whole thing away) of telling the story by means of a rather free paraphrase of what ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... grains of truth are in it." "Do not waste time by reading opinions that are mere echoes of your own; read opinions you disagree with, and you will catch aspects of truth you do not readily see." Through our long comradeship he was my sternest as well as gentlest critic, pointing out to me that in a party like ours, where our own education and knowledge were above those whom we led, it was very easy to gain indiscriminate praise and unstinted admiration; on the other hand, we received ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... Liberals and Conservatives, and all the Socialists of the day. She did not permit her Socialism, however, to penetrate below stairs; her cook and butler had every encouragement to be Individualists. Francesca, who was a keen and intelligent food critic, harboured no misgivings as to her hostess's kitchen and cellar departments; some of the human side-dishes at the feast gave her more ground for uneasiness. Courtenay Youghal, for instance, would probably be brilliantly silent; her brother ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... have been considered finished by a musical critic, it may have lacked restraint and nicety of shading; but no one who heard the Algonquin congregation that morning singing "Ye Gates lift up your heads," led by Lawyer Edward Brians, could doubt ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... written," wrote one critic in reviewing the story, which first appeared as a serial in a magazine of large circulation. A strong inquiry for the novel in book form developed, and we have just issued the book to ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... have upon a poor man perfectly innocent, I mean the printer. A lawyer may pick out expressions and make them liable to exception, where no other man is able to find any. But how can it be supposed, that an ignorant printer can be such a critic? He knew the author's design was honest, and approved by the whole kingdom, he advised with friends, who told him there was no harm in the book, and he could see none himself. It was sent him in an unknown hand, but the same in which ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... had a king named Cole. According to the more serious story, the saint's father was an innkeeper; and the only recorded action of Cole is well within the resources of that calling. It would not be nearly so unwise as to deduce from the written word, as some critic of the future may do, that the natives of Colchester ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... important as what is included. But we must not carry this too far; we should be foolish indeed did we assert that those things omitted from such a code as Ptah-hotep's were not practised or not held to be important in his day. For example, he 'knows nothing'—as a Higher Critic would say—of kindness to animals; but we know from many things that the Egyptians treated animals kindly and made much of them as pets. In the very tomb of that Ptah-hotep mentioned above,[15] who may be our author, is depicted the bringing of three dogs ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... air of moral superiority, her adamantine obstinacy. He missed terribly her candid worship of him, to which he had grown accustomed and which had become nearly a necessity of his existence. He could not live with an eternal critic; the prospect was totally inconceivable. He wanted love, and he wanted admiring love, and without it marriage was meaningless ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... brasin-huse, as having been originally located in that part of the royal mansion which was devoted to the then important accommodation of a brew house." -From a Review of Ingram's Memorials in the British Critic, vol. xxiv, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... be helped into my room—in strict accordance with what one sceptical critic of occultism has called ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... "custom of looking . . . full upon the Spectators," and that some members of the Restoration audience took printed copies into the playhouse in order to be able to follow the play on the stage.[10] It is a real loss to the historian of drama and to the critic that these two volumes were Laurence Echard's solitary adventure into the ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... with Mendelian speculation, have not reported from what stock his family sprang. Scientific curiosity and nationalistic egotism have compelled modern biographers to become anthropologists. Vergil has accordingly been referred, by some critic or other, to each of the several peoples that settled the Po Valley in ancient times: the Umbrians, the Etruscans, the Celts, the Latins. The evidence cannot be mustered into a compelling conclusion, but it may be worth while to ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... consciousness of this, the knowledge that I was being anointed already out of the vials of his wrath, that made me fall to criticising the critic, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to philosophical immortality rests upon his constructive work as an ethicist, and not on his critical work as a speculative thinker. It is well known that the two philosophies of Kant are not prima facie harmonious, that he finds himself compelled to deny as a critic that of which he is most certain as a moralist. Thus the great facts of theism, immortality and the autonomy or freedom of the will, he professes himself unable to know save as revelations of the moral order. ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Wickham would say was, he heard it was a wagon. As for Bright, one might as well seek information of the Sphinx. There never was a man who, knowing all about a matter, could look, as more than one fair critic had been heard to say, so exasperatingly, idiotically ignorant. At noon, however, it was known that Willett's wagon stopped but a few moments on the plaza in the little mining town and capital, then shot away ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of 'The Golden Age,' Barry Pain, now a well known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief secretary, and Oscar Wilde, who was some eight years or ten older than the rest. But faces and names are vague to me and, while faces that I met but once may rise clearly ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... The verses are easy, and, though rather in the ballad style, are free from any palpable irreverence. The plates are after the works of masters, and in the style, both of drawing and colouring, remind one of the severe and simple effect of old painted windows."—British Critic. ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... of his literary life Poe was connected with various newspapers and magazines in Richmond, Philadelphia and New York. He was faithful, punctual, industrious, thorough. N. P. Willis, who for some time employed Poe as critic and sub-editor on ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to resist recording something of what I saw and felt; and if the publication of my hasty record be an error, it will be deemed by my friends, I hope, a pardonable one. My book can scarcely demand the serious attention of the critic; nor could criticism well expect a better style from one whose profession is seldom supposed to allow much leisure to acquire nicety in the arts of composition. I claim no other merit for my Notes than having followed ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... field. But besides this experienced and able campaigner, who so thoroughly shared the opinions of Prince Maurice, every military man in the provinces of any consideration, was opposed to, the scheme. Especially Lewis William—than whom no more sagacious military critic or accomplished strategist existed in Europe, denounced it with energy and even with indignation. It was, in the opinion of the young stadholder of Friesland, to suspend the existence of the whole ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... else tells me of a clever young lady who applied for a position as dramatic critic upon a newspaper. The editor recognized her ability and her knowledge of the drama, but he said he was afraid to employ a woman in such a department, lest her feelings should prevent her telling the exact truth. She ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... not surprising that this philosophy, when compared with that of a critic like Mr. Mill, should stand out in clear and sharp antagonism. Mr. Mill is one of the most distinguished representatives of that school of Materialism which Sir W. Hamilton denounces as virtual Atheism. We do not mean that he consciously adopts the grosser tenets ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... obnoxious accident which has yet befallen me, the most wanton blow below the belt which Fate has ever dealt me, is buried beneath the snows of twenty years. But even now I cannot recall it without a shudder. And if a carping critic ventures to point out that blows below the belt are not often buried beneath snow, then all I can say is that when I have made my meaning clear, I see no reason for a servile conformity ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... is admitted. It seemed to be a combination of errors and omissions from the beginning, which furnished food for unfavorable criticism and condemnation by journalistic and arm-chair critics which created impressions on the public mind that exist even at the present day. Of course each critic would have done different—this plan or that plan "should have been" adopted, regardless of all military rules. The trite saying that "nothing succeeds like success" should be supplemented by adding, "and nothing more reprehensive than failure." In military operations success ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... that this answer was borrowed from Virgil, and goes strongly against the genuineness of the manuscript. The Editor's memory was upon the stretch to recollect the words; the learned critic supplied them:- ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... some of them Jimson mentioned with awe. An unwholesome youth was Aronson, the great novelist; a sturdy, bristling fellow with a fierce moustache was Letchford, the celebrated leader-writer of the Critic. Several were pointed out to me as artists who had gone one better than anybody else, and a vast billowy creature was described as the leader of the new Orientalism in England. I noticed that these people, according to Jimson, were all 'great', and that ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... recognise in Stevenson's wife a character as strong, interesting, and romantic almost as his own; an inseparable sharer of all his thoughts and staunch companion of all his adventures; the most open-hearted of friends to all who loved him; the most shrewd and stimulating critic of his work; and in sickness, despite her own precarious health, the most devoted and most efficient ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that six years before that introductory statement by Pessina, Giovanni Bovio gave lectures at this university, which he published later on under the title of "A Critical Study of Criminal Law." Giovanni Bovio performed in this monograph the function of a critic, but the historical time of his thought, prevented him from taking part in the construction of a new science. However, he prepared the ground for new ideas, by pointing out all the rifts and weaknesses of the old building. Bovio maintained that which Gioberti, ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... remember the time when the predominant colours of Cyclamen were purple and magenta, and it was impossible for the most friendly critic to feel enthusiastic concerning these flowers. But the new colours—Salmon Pink, Salmon Scarlet, the intense Vulcan, Rose Queen and Cherry Red, together with Giant White and White Butterfly—are now regarded ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... standard far more stringent than any other book, not excepting the other sacred books. No critic would think of treating any other book as he treats the Bible, nor of requiring of any other book what he requires of the Bible. The more men hate God, the more they hate his Word; and this has a deep, underlying reason, and that reason, I believe, is ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... hero was a severe military critic, he was never an unjust one, neither did he spare his own men. Though not a martinet, which was foreign to every fibre of his nature, he was a stickler for rigid discipline. When the expedition was recalled, he ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... self-esteem which dwelt, like a perpetual spring, upon the mind of Mr. Stubbs. Mr. McCrab was himself an amateur actor; he had also written a tolerably successful comedy, as well as an unsuccessful tragedy; and he was, besides, a formidable critic, whose scalping strictures, in a weekly journal, were the terror of all authors and actors who were either unable or unwilling ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... Its advertising columns were eagerly sought for; he at once advanced the rates. People bought successive issues to gaze upon this monumental record of extravagance. A singular idea, which, however, brought further fortune to the paper, was advanced by an astute critic at the Eureka Saloon. "My opinion, gentlemen, is that the whole blamed thing is a bluff! There ain't no Mr. Dimmidge; there ain't no Mrs. Dimmidge; there ain't no desertion! The whole rotten thing is an ADVERTISEMENT o' suthin'! Ye'll find afore ye get through with it that that there wife ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... some respects is the very worst 4to now extant in the world—viz., a critical edition of the. "Paradise Lost." I observe, in the "Edinburgh Review," (July, 1851, No. 191, p. 15,) that a learned critic supposes Bentley to have meant this edition as a "practical jest." Not at all. Neither could the critic have fancied such a possibility, if he had taken the trouble (which I did many a year back) to examine it. A jest book it certainly is, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... you," answered the critic, shaking his head despondingly; "I do not at all understand it. I can only say that I have been accustomed to censure all discourse that ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... else you may be fitted for, you aren't fitted to be a novelist.' Mr. Walpole was grieved. Perhaps he was unaware, then, that a similar experience had happened to Joseph Conrad. I am unable to judge the schoolmaster's fitness to be a critic, because I have not read The Wooden Horse. Walpole once promised to send me a copy so that I might come to some conclusion as to the schoolmaster, but he did not send it. Soon after this deplorable incident, Walpole met Charles Marriott, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... with something more tangible than a sarcastic verse. He quite admitted, even to himself, that a critic had every right to criticise—that was what he was for—but he claimed that a man who pretended to be an author's friend and who praised his books to his face, had no right to go behind his back and pen a criticism so scathing as that which appeared ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... Senate was a noteworthy one. The progressive senators of the Middle West, led by Dolliver, of Iowa, and La Follette, of Wisconsin, fought the measure sturdily, but with little success. "Jokers" slipped in here and there, and more than one critic has charged that the Senate was less solicitous for the rights of the consumers than for the rights ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... no circumstances to be followed. Americans are so familiar with the European traveler who arrives and makes up his opinion over night in regard to men, morals, and manners in the Western world and have so often been the victim of this self-confident critic, that they ought not to repeat the same blunder in dealing with other peoples. [Footnote: The Outlook, ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried, When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died, We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it — lie down for an ]aeon or two, Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... state of German nationalism will of course appear biased to anyone who has been in the habit of rating German Culture high in all its bearings, and to whom at the same time the ideals of peace and liberty appeal. Indeed, such a critic, gifted with the due modicum of asperity, might well be provoked to call it all a more or less ingenious diatribe of partisan malice. But it can be so construed only by those who see the question at issue as a point of invidious distinction between this German ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... after what he called thirty years of slavery, he was able to resign his post of critic. "Thanks to 'The Trojans,' the ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... their length, and with an indifference so sublime to the popular desire that he should get along with his personal narrative, was hardly calculated to conciliate critical opinion; but it had one capital effect. It drew from Whitwell Elwin, himself a Norfolk man, and a literary critic of the widest grasp and knowledge, this remarkable testimony: that far from exaggerating such incidents as were drawn from his own experience (not a few, as he himself could verify), Borrow's descriptions were rather within the truth than beyond it. "However picturesquely ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... one was ever so able to trace out the most secret workings of the great master's mind, or to retain his full, calm self-possession when following him on his highest flights; no one ever united in such perfection the great critic with the great poet. One may look forward, therefore, with confidence to the greatest work in aesthetical criticism that even Germany ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... speculation he was probably quite ignorant. I find indeed that Place had called his attention to the account of Kant, published by Wirgman in the Encyclopaedia Londinensis 1817. Mill about the same time tells Place that he has begun to read The Critic of Pure Reason. 'I see clearly enough,' he says, 'what poor Kant would be about, but it would require some time to give an account of him.' He wishes (December 6, 1817) that he had time to write a book which would 'make the human mind as ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... witty things that I had ever read in my life. I was delighted with DENNIS, and was heartily ashamed of my former admiration of CATO, and felt no little resentment against POPE and SWIFT for their endless reviling of this most able and witty critic. This, as far as I recollect, was the first emancipation that had assisted me in my reading. I have, since that time, never taken any thing upon trust: I have judged for myself, trusting neither to the opinions of writers nor in the fashions of the day. Having been told by DR. BLAIR, in his ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... that a good critique on a poem may be written by one who is no poet himself. This, according to your idea and mine of poetry, I feel to be false-the less poetical the critic, the less just the critique, and the converse. On this account, and because there are but few B-'s in the world, I would be as much ashamed of the world's good opinion as proud of your own. Another than yourself might here observe, 'Shakespeare is in possession of the world's ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... scented judge of human beings received the point of the elbow of Gallus between the eyes just where the nose is set into the forehead. With such force and skill was the blow directed that next instant the critic was sprawling on his back upon the pavement, the blood gushing from his nostrils. Now most of them laughed, but ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... service of worship.[47] Next, try to overcome the present popular obsession regarding the sermon. The church is more than an oratory station. The sermon is only one incident. Many criticisms of the sermon indicate that the critic measures the preacher by ability to entertain, that he attends church to be entertained. If that is essentially your attitude, you cannot complain if your children are dissatisfied unless they too are entertained according to their childish appetites. When the sermon is poor, ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... critic. He has pulled out his carving-knife and his tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is going to have for breakfast. This one's arms are put on wrong. I did not notice it at first, but I see it now. Somehow he ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... us not forget that he possessed the gift which to an artist is the very root of the matter. He saw Nature truly, he saw her as she is, and with his own eyes. The critic whom I have just quoted boldly pronounces him "the keenest eyed of all modern poets for what is deep and essential in nature." When he describes the daisy, casting the beauty of its star-shaped shadow on the smooth stone, or the boundless depth of the abysses of the sky, or the clouds ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... "I am a fair critic of the works in verse and prose that are shown me; but perhaps I speak my opinion with almost too great freedom. Another fault in me is that I have sometimes a spirit of delicacy far too scrupulous, and a spirit of criticism far too severe. I do not dislike an argument, and ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... despatch just received from M. Gordkin's agent at Sydney announces that the famous artist's temperature is now normal and his pulse steady at 60. The cause of his recent trivial indisposition was a hostile criticism in a local paper, but with the dismissal of the critic the incident is now regarded as closed, and M. Gordkin will resume his saltatorial activities in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... pages in the Pilgrim's Progress, than by a long discourse upon the will and the intellect, and simple and complex ideas.' Nothing short of extraordinary merit could have called for such a eulogy from so severe a critic. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Mayence who had distinguished himself as a Greek and Hebrew scholar, happened to question the usual interpretation of the passage in Isaiah which refers to the virgin-born Immanuel, and showed then—what every competent critic knows now—that it had reference to events looked for in older Jewish history. The censorship and faculty of theology attacked him at once and brought him before the elector. Luckily, this potentate was one ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White |
