"You don't have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good."
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Criticism quotes
Criticism
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Criticism quotes (page 20 of 68)
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"First, if you love the Kindle and it works for you, it isn't problematic, and you should ignore all my criticisms and read the way you want to read."
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"Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots."
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"Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?"
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"Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism."
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"Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness."
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"I can think of no better reason to vote against Obama than the prospect of an administration where any criticism of the President is treated as racism."
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"However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the lay, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned."
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"Our taste is too delicate and particular. It says nay to the poet's work, but never yea to his hope."
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"No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know."
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"To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it."
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"Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West."
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"Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test."
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"The practice of "reviewing"... in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism."
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"The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life."
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"We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it."
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"Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed."
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"I am more afraid of deserving criticism than of receiving it. I stand in awe of my own opinion. The secret demerits of which we alone, perhaps, are conscious, are often more difficult to bear than those which have been publicly censured in us, and thus in some degree atoned for."
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"We criticize a thinker more acutely when he advances a proposition that is disagreeable to us; and yet it would be more reasonableto do so when his proposition is agreeable to us."
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"We criticize a man or a book most sharply when we sketch out their ideal."
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