Hold their farthing candle to the sun.
Nature fits all her children with something to do.
It is not socialist, as some of our critics contend. It isn’t purely capitalist, either. It is a new way. A third way. A more humane, trusting, productive, exhilarating, and, in every sense, rewarding way. [ Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace , Warner Books, September 1993.]
Children have more need of models than of critics.
Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough state or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical laboratory has scales and weights, but neither crucible nor touchstone.
After all God doesn’t want you to be an imitation of someone else. You should be the original you were created to be. There is an anointing on your life, an empowerment. Not to be somebody else, but to be you. If you let people squeeze you into their molds and you bow down to their pressure to try to please your critics, it not only takes away your uniqueness, but it also lessens the favor on your life.
Which not even critics criticise.
What a blessed thing it is that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!
By the students of the science of religion the Old Testament can only be looked upon as a strictly historical book by the side of other historical books. It can claim no privilege before the tribunal of history, nay, to claim such a privilege would be to really deprive it of the high position which it justly holds among the most valuable monuments of the distant past. But the authorship of the single books which form the Old Testament, and more particularly the dates at which they were reduced to writing, form the subject of keen controversy, not among critics hostile to religion, but among theologians who treat these questions in the most independent, but at the same time the most candid and judicial, spirit. By this treatment many difficulties, which in former times disturbed the minds of thoughtful theologians, have been removed, and the Old Testament has resumed its rightful place among the most valuable monuments of antiquity.... But this was possible on one condition only, namely, that the Old Testament should be treated simply as an historical book, willing to submit to all the tests of historical criticism to which other historical books have submitted.
We have gotten some terrible reviews at times but if we depended on the judgment of the studios or critics, we never would have made more than one movie.
As soon Seek roses in December, ice in June; Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff; Believe a woman or an epitaph, Or any other thing that 's false, before You trust in critics.
Nine-tenths of our critics have told us little more of Shakespeare than what honest Franz Horn says his neighbours used to tell of him, "he was a great spirit, and stept majestically along."
We are not trying to entertain the critics. I'll take my chances with the public.
That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.
Crux criticorum=--The puzzle of critics.
Those critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analyzed the laws of æsthetic beauty, concur in maintaining that the real truthfulness of all works of imagination--sculpture, painting, written fiction--is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent the positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,--imported by Madame de Stael, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics,--"Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of--the air!"
We're not trying to entertain the critics … I'll take my chances with the public.
Transforms old print To zigzag manuscript, and cheats the eyes Of gallery critics by a thousand arts.
Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.
There are some critics who change everything that comes under their hands to gold, but to this privilege of Midas they join sometimes his ears!--_J. Petit Senn._
You know who critics are?--the men who have failed in literature and art.
Though we cannot know things finite, as they are in themselves, we know at all events that they are. And this applies to our perception of the Infinite also. We do not know through our senses what it is, but we know through our very senses that it is. We feel the pressure of the Infinite in the Finite, and unless we had that feeling, we should have no true and safe foundation for whatever we may afterwards believe of the Infinite. Some critics have urged that what I call the Infinite ... is the Indefinite only. Of course it is.... We can know the Infinite as the Indefinite only, or as the partially defined. We try to define it, and to know it more and more, but we never finish it. The whole history of religion represents the continuous progress of the human definition of the Infinite, but however far that definition may advance, it will never exhaust the Infinite. Could we define it all, it would cease to be the Infinite, it would cease to be the Unknown, it would cease to be the Inconceivable or the Divine.
There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on.
Man must serve his time to every trade / Save censure; critics all are ready made.
The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they failed to understand.
~Sneer.~--The most insignificant people are the most apt to sneer at others. They are safe from reprisals, and have no hope of rising in their own esteem but by lowering their neighbors. The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.--_Hazlitt._
Certain critics resemble closely those people who when they would laugh show ugly teeth.--_Joubert._
The great failure of the critic of culture, even when his intentions are benign, lies in his inability to recognize that the perfect world of peace, justice, equality, and environmental harmony of which he dreams — a utopia run by enlightened, sensitive, progressive (and preferably multi-degree) philosopher-kings — is a tyranny pure and simple. Philosopher-kings soon must discover a need for bureaucrats and policemen to administer and enforce their notion of the public good. They must also discover, to their chagrin, that the bureaucrats and policemen quickly will become the real power in such a society. This is precisely what happened to communism in its evolution from an intellectual, Marxist, social philosophy to a brutally anti-intellectual, Leninist, political system. [“;Critics of Culture” (commentary), Fidelity Magazine, March 1995, p. 14.]
Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!
Children have more need of models than of critics.--_Joubert._
In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new; an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking, is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, "Anyone can cook". But I realize — only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more.
The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
The community as a whole doesn't listen patiently to critics who adopt alternative viewpoints. Although the great lesson of history is that knowledge develops through the conflict of viewpoints. If you simply have a consensus, it generally stultifies. It fails to see the problems of that consensus and it depends on the existence of critics to break up that iceberg and permit knowledge to develop. This is in fact one of the underpinnings of democratic theory. It is one of the reasons why we believe in notions of free speech and its one of the great forces in terms of intellectual development.
Work for eternity: not the meagre rhetorical eternity of the periodical critics, but for the real eternity, wherein dwelleth the Divine.
Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
~Ancients.~--In tragedy and satire I maintain, against some critics, that this age and the last have excelled the ancients; and I would instance in Shakespeare of the former, in Dorset of the latter.--_Dryden._
Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.
Sir Henry Wotton used to say that critics are like brushers of noblemen's clothes.
Higgeldy Piggeldy, Hamlet of Elsinore Ruffled the critics by Dropping this bomb: "Phooey on Freud and his Psychoanalysis -- Oedipus, Shmoedipus, I just love Mom."
AmigaDOS Beer: The company has gone out of business, but their recipe has been picked up by some weird German company, so now this beer will be an import. This beer never really sold very well because the original manufacturer didn't understand marketing. Like Unix Beer, AmigaDOS Beer fans are an extremely loyal and loud group. It originally came in a 16-oz. can, but now comes in 32-oz. cans too. When this can was originally introduced, it appeared flashy and colorful, but the design hasn't changed much over the years, so it appears dated now. Critics of this beer claim that it is only meant for watching TV anyway.
I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya. -- Stravinsky
"I don't know what their gripe is. A critic is simply someone paid to render opinions glibly." "Critics are grinks and groinks." -- Baron and Badger, from Badger comics
The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city. Colleges may be to blame. English majors are encouraged, I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the quad. And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors, and they are squeamish about technology to this very day. So it is natural for them to despise science fiction. -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., "Science Fiction"
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs. -- Christopher Hampton
"Oh," cried the prince, "I have often thought that! Why, I know of a murder, for the sake of a watch. It's in all the papers now. But if some writer had invented it, all the critics would have jumped down his throat and said the thing was too improbable for anything. And yet you read it in the paper, and you can't help thinking that out of these strange disclosures is to be gained the full knowledge of Russian life and character. You said that well, general; it is so true," concluded the prince, warmly, delighted to have found a refuge from the fiery blushes which had covered his face.
If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou Just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!
If Descartes had followed out this line of thought, he would have been led at once to the pantheism of Spinoza, if not beyond it. As it is, he is on the verge of contradiction with himself when he speaks of the consciousness of God as _in some sense_ prior to the consciousness of self. How can anything be prior to the first principle of knowledge? It is no answer to say that the consciousness of God is the _principium essendi_, while the consciousness of self is the _principium cognoscendi_. For, if the idea of God is prior to the idea of self, knowledge must begin where existence begins, with God. The words "in some sense," with which Descartes qualifies his assertion of the priority of the idea of God, only betray his hesitation and his partial consciousness of the contradiction in which he is involved. Some of Descartes's critics presented this difficulty to him in another form, and accused him of reasoning in a circle when he said that it is because God cannot lie that we are certain that our clear and distinct ideas do not deceive us. The very existence of the conscious self, the _cogito, ergo sum_, which is the first of all truths and therefore prior in certitude to the existence of God, is believed only because of the clearness and distinctness with which we apprehend it. How then, they argued, could God's truthfulness be our security for a principle which we must use in order to prove the being of God? The answer of Descartes is somewhat lame. We cannot doubt any self-evident principle, or even any truth based on a self-evident principle, when we are directly contemplating it in all the necessity of its evidence; it is only when we forget or turn away from this evidence, and begin to think of the possibility of a deceitful God, that a doubt arises which cannot be removed except by the conviction that God is true.[5] It can scarcely be said that this is a _dignus vindice nodus_, or that God can fitly appear as a kind of second-best resource to the forgetful spirit that has lost its direct hold on truth and its faith in itself. God, truth, and the human spirit are thus conceived as having merely external and accidental relations with each other. What Descartes, however, is really expressing in this exoteric way is simply that beneath and beyond all particular truths lies the great general truth of the unity of thought and existence. In contemplating particular truth, we may not consciously relate it to this unity, but when we have to defend ourselves against scepticism we are forced to realize this relation. The ultimate answer to any attack upon a special aspect or element of truth must be to show that the fate of truth itself, the very possibility of knowledge, is involved in the rejection of it, and that we cannot doubt it without doubting reason itself. But to doubt reason is, in the language of Descartes, to doubt the truthfulness of God, for, in his view, the idea of God is involved in the very constitution of reason. Taken in this way then, the import of Descartes's answer is, that the consciousness of self, like every other particular truth, is not at first seen to rest on the consciousness of God, but that when we realize what it means we see that it does so rest. But if this be so, then in making the consciousness of self his first principle of knowledge, Descartes has stopped short of the truth. It can only be the first principle if it is understood, not as the consciousness of the individual self, but in a sense in which the consciousness of self is identical with the consciousness of God. Entry: CARTESIANISM
BARRY, SPRANGER (1719-1777), British actor, was born in Dublin on the 23rd of November 1719, the son of a silversmith, to whose business he was brought up. His first appearance on the stage was at the Smock Alley theatre on the 5th of February 1744, and his engagement at once increased its prosperity. His first London appearance was made in 1746 as Othello at Drury Lane. Here his talents were speedily recognized, and in _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ he alternated with Garrick, arousing the latter's jealousy by his success as Romeo. This resulted in his leaving Drury Lane for Covent Garden in 1750, accompanied by Mrs Cibber, his Juliet. Both houses now at once put on _Romeo and Juliet_ for a series of rival performances, and Barry's impersonation was preferred by the critics to Garrick's. In 1758 Barry built the Crow Street theatre, Dublin, and later a new theatre in Cork, but he was not successful as a manager and returned to London to play at the Haymarket, then under the management of Foote. As his second wife, he married in 1768 the actress Mrs Dancer (1734-1801), and he and Mrs Barry played under Garrick's management, Barry appearing in 1767, after ten years' absence from the stage, in Othello, his greatest part. In 1774 they both moved to Covent Garden, where Barry remained until his death on the 10th of January 1777. He was a singularly handsome man, with the advantage of height which Garrick lacked. Entry: BARRY
In 1821 Hegel published the _Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts_ (2nd ed., 1840; ed. G. J. B. Bolland, 1901; Eng. trans., _Philosophy of Right_, by S. W. Dyde, 1896). It is a combined system of moral and political philosophy, or a sociology dominated by the idea of the state. It turns away contemptuously and fiercely from the sentimental aspirations of reformers possessed by the democratic doctrine of the rights of the omnipotent nation. Fries is stigmatized as one of the "ringleaders of shallowness" who were bent on substituting a fancied tie of enthusiasm and friendship for the established order of the state. The disciplined philosopher, who had devoted himself to the task of comprehending the organism of the state, had no patience with feebler or more mercurial minds who recklessly laid hands on established ordinances, and set them aside where they contravened humanitarian sentiments. With the principle that whatever is real is rational, and whatever is rational is real, Hegel fancied that he had stopped the mouths of political critics and constitution-mongers. His theory was not a mere formulation of the Prussian state. Much that he construed as necessary to a state was wanting in Prussia; and some of the reforms already introduced did not find their place in his system. Yet, on the whole, he had taken his side with the government. Altenstein even expressed his satisfaction with the book. In his disgust at the crude conceptions of the enthusiasts, who had hoped that the war of liberation might end in a realm of internal liberty, Hegel had forgotten his own youthful vows recorded in verse to Hölderlin, "never, never to live in peace with the ordinance which regulates feeling and opinion." And yet if we look deeper we see that this is no worship of existing powers. It is rather due to an overpowering sense of the value of organization--a sense that liberty can never be dissevered from order, that a vital interconnexion between all the parts of the body politic is the source of all good, so that while he can find nothing but brute weight in an organized public, he can compare the royal person in his ideal form of constitutional monarchy to the dot upon the letter i. A keen sense of how much is at stake in any alteration breeds suspicion of every reform. Entry: HEGEL
The extravagance of Job's assertions was occasioned greatly by the extreme position of his friends, which left no room for his conscious innocence along with the rectitude of God. Again, the poet's purpose, as the prologue shows, was to teach that afflictions may fall on a man out of all connexion with any offence of his own, and merely as the trial of his righteousness; and hence he allows Job, as by a true instinct of the nature of his sufferings, to repudiate all connexion between them and sin in himself. And further, the terrible conflict into which the suspicions of the Satan brought Job could not be exhibited without pushing him to the verge of ungodliness. These are all elements of the poet's art; but art and nature are one. In ancient Hebrew life the sense of sin was less deep than it is now. In the desert, too, men speak boldly of God. Nothing is more false than to judge the poet's creation from our later point of view, and construct a theory of the book according to a more developed sense of sin and a deeper reverence for God than belonged to antiquity. In complete contradiction to the testimony of the book itself, some critics, as Hengstenberg and Budde, have assumed that Job's spiritual pride was the cause of his afflictions, that this was the root of bitterness in him which must be killed down ere he could become a true saint. The fundamental position of the book is that Job was already a true saint; this is testified by God Himself, is the radical idea of the author in the prologue, and the very hypothesis of the drama. We might be ready to think that Job's afflictions did not befall him out of all connexion with his own condition of mind, and we might be disposed to find a vindication of God's ways in this. There is no evidence that such an idea was shared by the author of the book. It is remarkable that the attitude which we imagine it would have been so easy for Job to assume, namely, while holding fast his integrity, to fall back upon the inexplicableness of providence, of which there are such imposing descriptions in his speeches, is just the attitude which is taken up in ch. xxviii. It is far from certain, however, that this chapter is an integral part of the original book. Entry: JOB
If judged by what he denies, viz. the formal logic of Hamilton and Mansel, whose Aristotelian and scholastic learning did but accentuate their traditionalism, and whose acquiescence in consistency constituted in Mill's view a discouragement of research, such as men now incline to attribute at the least equally to Hume's idealism, Mill is only negatively justified. If judged by his positive contribution to the theory of method he may claim to find a more than negative justification for his teaching in its success. In the field covered by scholastic logic Mill is frankly associationist. He aims at describing what he finds given, without reference to insensible implications of doubtful validity and value. The upshot is a psychological account of what from one aspect is evidence, from the other, belief. So he explains "concepts or general notions"[117] by an abstraction which he represents as a sort of alt-relief operated by attention and fixed by naming, association with the name giving to a set of attributes a unity they otherwise lack. This is manifestly, when all is said, a particular psychological event, a collective fact of the associative consciousness. It can exercise no organizing or controlling function in knowledge. So again in determining the "import" of propositions, it is no accident that in all save existential propositions it is to the familiar rubrics of associationism--co-existence, sequence, causation and resemblance--that he refers for classification, while his general formula as to the conjunctions of connotations is associationist through and through. It follows consistently enough that inference is from particular to particular. Mill holds even the ideas of mathematics to be hypothetical, and in theory knows nothing of a non-enumerative or non-associative universal. A premise that has the utmost universality consistent with this view can clearly be of no service for the establishment of a proposition that has gone to the making of it. Nor again of one that has not. Its use, then, can only be as a memorandum. It is a shorthand formula of registration. Mill's view of ratiocinative process clearly stands and falls with the presumed impossibility of establishing the necessity for universals of another type than his, for what may be called principles of construction. His critics incline to press the point that association itself is only intelligible so far as it is seen to depend on universals of the kind that he denies. Entry: J