English Critic Quotes

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).

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.

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.

What Nature has writ with her lusty wit Is worded so wisely and kindly That whoever has dipped in her manuscript Must up and follow her blindly.

William Ernest Henley