British Critic Quotes

Arthur Quiller-Couch
George Saintsbury
Kenneth Tynan
John Churton Collins

Without enthusiasm, the adventurer could never kindle that fire in his followers which is so necessary to consolidate their mutual interests; for no one can heartily deceive numbers who is not first of all deceived himself.

Among the admirable American expressions which enter our language from time to time to lend it new vitality, there is one which I would have every audience, and every lecturer, use at the end of every lecture or course: So what? What does all this amount to.

To ask advice is in nine cases out of ten to tout for flattery.

John Churton Collins
John Churton Collins
There is more suspense, more dramatic torque, in one page of [Nathaniel] Hawthorne's heart-racked ruminations onthe Christian consciencethaninall Demi Moore's woodland gallops and horizontal barn dancing.

To all who pass that they may see, Rock 'N' Roll was a part of me.

Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over-except when they are different.

It is one of the great charms of books that they have to end.

English literature is a kind of training in social ethics.... English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.

When a language creates – as it does – a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.

Good work, like good talk or any other form of worthwhile human relationship, depends upon being able to assume an extended shared world.

Science is the great cleanser of the human thinking; it makes impossible any religion but the highest.

It is science that brings us an understanding of the true complexity of natural systems. The insights from the science of ecology are teaching us how to work with the checks and balances of nature, and encouraging a new, rational, limited-input, environmentally sound means of vineyard management that offers a third way between the ideologically driven approach of Biodynamics and conventional chemical-based agricultural systems.

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?

John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison are the greatest composers since Beethoven, with Paul McCartney way out in front.

Not only is he not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.

Drinking good wine with good food in good company is one of life's most civilized pleasures.

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
George Saintsbury
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.

You will find many a creature by earth, air, and water, that is more beautiful than a woman.

Only the heel
Of splendid steel
Shall stand secure on sliding fate,
When golden navies weep their freight.

Arthur Quiller-Couch
Arthur Quiller-Couch
The big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, and these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion.

A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Tynan
It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.

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.