Literary Critics

"Being everything, let us admit that is to be something, Or give ourselves the benefit of the doubt; Let us offer our pinch of dust all to this God, And grant his reign over the entire building."

"Ripeness is all; her in her cooling planet Revere; do not presume to think her wasted. Project her no projectile, plan nor man it; Gods cool in turn, by the sun long outlasted."

"Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake. My house was on a cliff. The thing could take Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row. Then the long pause and then the bigger shake. It seemed the best thing to be up and go."

"It is the pain, it is the pain, endures. Your chemic beauty burned my muscles through. Poise of my hands reminded me of yours."

"All those large dreams by which men long live well Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell."

"Feign then what's by a decent tact believed And act that state is only so conceived, And build an edifice of form For house where phantoms may keep warm."

"Man, as the prying housemaid of the soul."

"There is a supreme God in the ethnological section; ... His smooth wood creeps with all the creeds of the world."

"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?"

"An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful....any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language."

"Attending there let us absorb the cultures of nations And dissolve into our judgement all their codes. Then, being clogged with a natural hesitation (People are continually asking one the way out), Let us stand here and admit that we have no road."

"But as to risings, I can tell you why. It is on contradiction that they grow. It seemed the best thing to be up and go. Up was the heartening and the strong reply The heart of standing is we cannot fly."

"No deeply-rooted tendency was ever extirpated by adverse argument. Not having originally been founded on argument, it cannot be destroyed by logic."

"Whatever lies beyond the limits of experience, and claims another origin than that of induction and deduction from established data, is illegitimate."

"Among the many strange servilities mistaken for pieties, one of the least lovely is that which hopes to flatter God by despising the world, and vilifying human nature."

"The great desire of this age is for a Doctrine which may serve to condense our knowledge, guide our researches, and shape our lives, so that Conduct may really be the consequence of Belief."

"The history of the race is but that of the individual "writ large"."

"Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills."

"Not to have fire is to be a skin that shrills."

"Remember that every drop that falls, bears into the bosom of the earth a quality of beautiful fertility."

"Buddhists and Christians contrive to agree about death Making death their ideal basis for different ideals. The Communists however disapprove of death Except when practical."

"A powerful critical talent who destroyed his own sense of proportion, Leavis was our brush with totalitarianism: we caught it as a mild fever instead of the full attack of meningitis. His career was the clearest possible proof that the course the arts take is not under the control of criticism."

"He is a critic of great gifts, insight and integrity; but those who are not entirely for him are wholly against him; he seeks not pupils but "disciples"; those disciples he has attracted who have not broken away have been, like the master, rancid and fanatic in manner."

"If ever a man came out fighting, Leavis did: this, to many of us is one of his major virtues, because of the importance of the things he was fighting for. With others, he was working to make English grow to its place as a central subject in a contemporary humane education, with the emphasis on criticism and on cultural history rather than on academicism and the vagaries of 'taste'. He was as uncompromising as he was urgent and as angry as he was determined."

"He doesn't know what he means, and doesn't know he doesn't know."

"The "great tradition" does not brook even the possibility of libidinal gratification between the pages as an end in itself, and FR Leavis's "eat up your broccoli" approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy."

"The very prevalence of what one might call the ‘outsider than thou’ attitude among intellectuals indicates that there is a form of competition for a perceived cultural good at work here. Whether it is the Cambridge don and influential critic F R. Leavis describing himself as an ‘outlaw’, or the old Etonian and widely published author and journalist George Orwell casting himself as a ‘literary pariah’, or the well-connected, well-heeled, well-reviewed novelist Virginia Woolf aspiring to found a ‘Society of Outsiders’ (or, more recently, the tenured professors-cum-media stars trying to lay claim to the prestige of the ‘exile’), the very repetitiveness of the claims tells us that what we are dealing with here is a symptom of the logic of being an intellectual, not an objective description of a social or cultural location. As a self-ascribed status, outsiderdom is an empowering identity, an attempt to use the available media to address the relevant publics without, so the claim goes, succumbing to the seductions and self-deceptions of insiderdom."

"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?"

"There is, of course, no complete solution. […] But we can do something. The chief means open to us is education […] There is no excuse for letting another generation be as vastly ignorant, or as devoid of understanding and sympathy, as we are ourselves."

"Try as I might, I could never feel any great affection for a man who so much resembled a Baked Alaska – sweet, warm and gungy on the outside, hard and cold within."

"I was searching for something a little more than a dashing metaphor, a good deal less than a cultural map: and for those purposes the two cultures is about right."

"There are no secrets in science."

"I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups ... Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension."

"A good deal of Paradise Lost strikes one as being almost as mechanical as bricklaying."

"Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension."

"The official world, the corridors of power."

"When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find that far more, and far more hideous, crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion."

"The only way to escape misrepresentation is never to commit oneself to any critical judgement that makes an impact – that is, never to say anything. I still, however think that the best way to promote profitable discussion is to be as clear as possible with oneself about what one sees and judges, to try and establish the essential discriminations in the given field of interest, and to state them as clearly as one can (for disagreement, if necessary)."

"It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great – the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life."

"Not only is he not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be."

"About the end of the eighteenth century fruitful suggestions and even clear presentations of this or that part of a large evolutionary doctrine came thick and fast, and from the most divergent quarters. Especially remarkable were those which came from Erasmus Darwin in England, from Maupertuis in France, from Oken in Switzerland, and from Herder, and, most brilliantly of all, from Goethe in Germany."

"Over the years, historians have tried to discern grand patterns, perhaps one grand pattern, that explain everything. For some religions, history provides evidence of the working out of a divine purpose. For the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, it demonstrated the manifestation of the infinite spirit (Geist) on earth. Karl Marx built on Hegel to produce his “scientific” history, which purported to show that history was moving inexorably toward its destined end of full Communism. Johann Gottfried von Herder, the influential German thinker of the late eighteenth century, history showed that an organic German nation had existed for centuries, although in political terms it had not yet reached its full potential. For imperialists like Sir Charles Dilke, the study of the past confirmed the superiority of the British race. Arnold Toynbee, whose work is largely neglected now, saw a pattern of challenge and response as civilizations grew great in overcoming obstacles and then failed as they turned soft and lazy. The Chinese, unlike most Western thinkers, did not see history as a linear process at all. Their scholars talked in terms of a dynastic cycle where dynasties came and went in an unending repetition, following the unchanging pattern of birth, maturity, and death, all under the aegis of heaven."

"Towards the close of the eighteenth century, Johann Gottfried Herder boldly proclaimed this idea, asserting that each age and every people embody ideals and capacities peculiar to themselves, thus allowing a fuller and more complete expression of the multiform potentialities of humankind than could otherwise occur. Herder expressly denied that one people or civilization was better than another. They were just different, in the same way that the German language was different from the French."

"Nowhere on earth does the rose of happiness blossom without thorns; but what bursts forth out of these thorns is everywhere and in various guises the transient, yet beautiful rose of man’s joy in living."

"We (Goethe and Herder) had not lived together long in this manner when he confided to me that he meant to be competitor for the prize which was offered at Berlin, for the best treatise on the origin of language. His work was already nearly completed, and, as he wrote a very neat hand, he could soon communicate to me, in parts, a legible manuscript. I had never reflected on such subjects, for I was yet too deeply involved in the midst of things to have thought about their beginning and end. The question, too, seemed to me in some measure and idle one; for if God had created man as man, language was just as innate in him as walking erect; he must have just as well perceived that he could sing with his throat, and modify the tones in various ways with tongue, palate, and lips, as he must have remarked that he could walk and take hold of things. If man was of divine origin, so was also language itself: and if man, considered in the circle of nature was a natural being, language was likewise natural. These two things, like soul and body, I could never separate. Silberschlag, with a realism crude yet somewhat fantastically devised, had declared himself for the divine origin, that is, that God had played the schoolmaster to the first men. Herder’s treatise went to show that man as man could and must have attained to language by his own powers. I read the treatise with much pleasure, and it was of special aid in strengthening my mind; only I did not stand high enough either in knowledge or thought to form a solid judgment upon it. But one was received just like the other; there was scolding and blaming, whether one agreed with him conditionally or unconditionally. The fat surgeon (Lobstein) had less patience than I; he humorously declined the communication of this prize-essay, and affirmed that he was not prepared to meditate on such abstract topics. He urged us in preference to a game of ombre, which we commonly played together in the evening."

"Das Maschinenwerk der Revolutionen irret mich also nicht mehr: es ist unserm Geschlecht so nötig, wie dem Strom seine Wogen, damit er nicht ein stehender Sumpf werde. Immer verjüngt in neuen Gestalten, blüht der Genius der Humanität."

"Air, fire, water and the earth evolve out of the spiritual and material staminibus in periodic cycles of time. Diverse connections of water, air, and light precede the emergence of the seed of the simplest plant, for instance moss. Many plants had to come into being, then die away before an animal emerged. Insects, birds, water animals, and night animals preceded the present animal forms; until finally the crown of earthly organization appeared—the human being, microcosm. He is the son of all the elements and beings, Nature’s most carefully chosen conception and the blossom of creation. He must be the youngest child of Nature; many evolutions and revolutions must have preceded his formation."

"Wie hinfällig alles Menschenwerk, ja wie drückend auch die beste Einrichtung in wenigen Geschlechtern werde. Die Pflanze blühet und blühet ab; eure Väter starben und verwesen: euer Tempel zerfällt: dein Orakelzelt, deine Gesetztafeln sind nicht mehr: das ewige Band der Menschen, die Sprache selbst veraltet; wie? und Eine Menschenverfassung, Eine politische oder Religionseinrichtung, die doch nur auf diese Stücke gebauet sein kann: sie sollte, sie wollte ewig dauern?"

"Jeder liebt sein Land, seine Sitten, seine Sprache, sein Weib, seine Kinder, nicht weil sie die besten auf der Welt, sondern weil sie die bewährten Seinigen sind, und er in ihnen sich und seine Mühe selbst liebt."

"The Hindus are the gentlest branch of humanity. They do not with pleasure offend anything that lives; they honor that which gives life and nourish themselves with the most innocent of foods, milk, rice, the fruits of the trees, the healthy herbs which their motherland dispenses . . . Moderation and calm, a soft feeling and a silent depth of the soul characterize their work and their pleasure, their morals and mythology, their arts and even their endurance under the most extreme yoke of humanity."