19th-century Critic Quotes

To yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often, it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this world.

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more,
And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood;
Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore.

Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimation of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness.

John Campbell Shairp

It makes the plant neither more nor less interesting that it smells sweet or stings; but the dispassionate interest of the botanist is often accompanied by the purely human pleasure in the beauty of the flower.

It was Mrs. Campbell, for instance, who, on a celebrated occasion, threw her companion into a flurry by describing her recent marriage as "the deep, deep peace of the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue."

Alexander Woollcott

What holy cities are to nomadic tribes — a symbol of race and a bond of union — great books are to the wandering souls of men: they are the Meccas of the mind.

George Edward Woodberry

A good sonnet appears to be a confession-in a word either patently artificial, and then it is bad, or good, then it sounds like autobiography.

George Lyman Kittredge

Compliment is taken literally only by the savage. The accuracy of compliment is not that of algebra.

Hullo! What's this? What are these funny brown-and-olive landscapes doing in an impressionist exhibition? Brown! I ask you? Isn't it absurd for a man to go on using brown and call himself an impressionist painter?

Morn on the waters, and purple and bright Bursts on the billows the flushing of light O'er the glad waves, like a child of the sun, See the tall vessel goes gallantly on.

Thomas Kibble Hervey

The sweetest memory is that which involves something which one should not have done; the bitterest, that which involves something which one should not have done, and which one did not do.

George Jean Nathan

Straight is the way to Acheron,
Whether the spirit's race is run
From Athens or from Meroe:
Weep not, far from home to die;
The wind doth blow in every sky
That wafts us to that doleful sea.

John Addington Symonds

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.

George Saintsbury

On Rousseau's 'Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains':

It would be equally correct to say that sheep are born carnivorous, and everywhere they nibble grass.

Let the children play
And sit like flowers upon thy grave
And crown with flowers,—that hardly have
A briefer blooming-tide than they.

Francis Turner Palgrave

A sonnet is a wave of melody
From heaving waters of the impassion'd soul.

Theodore Watts-Dunton

There is no such thing as an absolute truth to be discovered.

Oh, promise me that some day you and I Will take our love together to some sky Where we can be alone and faith renew, And find the hollows where those flowers grew.