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Quotes by Critic
"Truth is the object of philosophy, but not always of philosophers."
7
"Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves."
7
"In Fargo, they say, well, that's a job. How well do you get paid? For example, for this book I was written about in Entertainment Weekly, and it was kind of cool because my mom asked me if Entertainment Weekly was a magazine or a newspaper."
7
"So it's a much more difficult issue to organize around, because you can't get media at all to make your case. And that's where cases tend to be made politically."
7
"Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us."
7
"Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have."
7
"The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope."
7
"Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you."
7
"In prosperity, our friends know us; in adversity, we know our friends."
7
"The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation."
7
"If quantitatively the American achievement is impressive, qualitatively it is somewhat less satisfying."
7
"After 27 years, I walked out of my first one a few months ago. Black Sheep with Chris Farley."
7
"But no one can praise Roosevelt for doing this and then insist that he restored our traditional political and economic systems to their former vitality."
7
"Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be."
7
"The criteria, for me, is movie star. It's Hollywood. Not Somalia."
7
"Even though I wanted to experience all these things I was interested in, I couldn't get them. So I had to think critically and culturally about what was available."
7
"Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words."
7
"To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought."
7
"The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting-points, and by unconnected roads."
7
"Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book."
7
"The amateur is very rare in French literature - as rare as he is common in our own."
7
"One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most."
7
"A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one."
6
"Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses."
6
"With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch."
6
"This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking."
6
"The Holy Bible is an abyss. It is impossible to explain how profound it is, impossible to explain how simple it is."
6
"I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner."
6
"People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know."
6
"Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at lying. Thus - as a writer myself - I cannot comment on whether or not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually mean its complete opposite."
6
"Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end."
6
"A love for humanity came over me, and watered and fertilised the fields of my inner world which had been lying fallow, and this love of humanity vented itself in a vast compassion."
6
"I keep saying the word "weird" over and over again, but it's the only way I can describe it."
6
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