English Critic Quotes

John Ruskin

Matthew Arnold

Herbert Read

A. S. Byatt

William Ernest Henley

Michael Moorcock

John Addington Symonds

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.

I don't know what art is, but I do know what it isn't. And it isn't someone walking around with a salmon over his shoulder, or embroidering the name of everyone they have slept with on the inside of a tent.

We want to do something and a definition is a means of doing it. If we want certain results then we must use certain meanings or definitions. But no definition has any authority apart from a purpose, or to bar us from other purposes.

Back o'er the deep I turn my longing eyes,
And chide the wayward passions that rebel:
Yet boots it not to think, or to complain,
Musing sad ditties to the reckless main.
To dreams like these, adieu! the pealing bell
Speaks of the hour that stays not—and the day
To life's sad turmoil calls my heart away.

William Lisle Bowles

This [Oh, Calcutta!] is the kind of show to give pornography a dirty name.

Never work for a liberal employer, dear boy, they'll sack you on Christmas Eve.

Learned at his father's knee

Philip Hope-Wallace

There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.

He that peruses Homer, is like the traveller that surveys mount Atlas; the vastness and roughness of its rocks, the solemn gloominess of its pines and cedars, the everlasting snows that cover its head, the torrents that rush down its sides, and the wild beasts that roar in its caverns, all contribute to strike the imagination with inexpressible astonishment and awe. While reading the Aeneid is like beholding the Capitoline hill at Rome, on which stood many edifices of exquisite architecture, and whose top was crowned with the famous temple of Jupiter, adorned with the spoils of conquered Greece.

On me, on me
Time and change can heap no more!
The painful past with blighting grief
Hath left my heart a withered leaf.
Time and change can do no more.

Richard Henry Horne

If the equality of individuals and the dignity of man be myths, they are myths to which the republic is committed.

Howard Mumford Jones

A song to the oak, the brave old oak,
Who hath ruled in the greenwood long!

Henry Fothergill Chorley

We will indulge in all those miscellaneous commercial operations, which when conducted on a small scale are called thieving, but a large scale, financing.

Henry Savile Clarke

A woman scorn'd is pitiless as fate,
For then the dread of shame adds stings to hate.

William Gifford

The names of colors are at the edge between where language fails and where it's most powerful.

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

Love me little, love me long,
Is the burden of my song.
Love that is too hot and strong
Burneth soon to waste.

John Payne Collier

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

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

We demand that people should be true to the pictures we have of them, no matter how repulsive those pictures may be: we prefer the true portrait (as we have conceived it), in all its homogeneity, to one with a detail added which refuses to fit in.

Pamela Hansford Johnson

Shall I make it clear, boys, for all to apprehend, Those that will not hear, boys, waiting for the end, Knowing it is near, boys, trying to pretend, Sitting in cold fear, boys, waiting for the end?

Legends are best left as legends and attempts to make them real are rarely successful

Michael Moorcock

Even the greatest poets need something to cling to. Keats had Beauty; Milton had God. T. S. Eliot's standby was Worry.

John Carey (critic)

Saint-Exupéry is perhaps the writer who has most clearly (certainly most accessibly) expressed a philosophy of moral realism, which perhaps accounts for his enormous influence on the post-war generation in France (and his failure to make a like impression on the flabby moral tissue of the post-war generation in Great Britain and the United States).

The secret of pleasure in life, as distinct from its great triumphs of transcendent joy, is to live in a series of small, legitimate successes. By legitimate I mean such as are not accompanied by self-condemnation.

Sydney Thompson Dobell

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.