Critics From The United States

"I know, of course, nothing about vice, but I have known virtue when it was very tiresome." "Ah, then it was a poor affair. It was poor virtue. The best virtue is never tiresome." Miss Vivian looked at him a little, with her fine discriminating eye. "What a dreadful thing to have to think any virtue poor!"

"It is nothing against the validity of a friendship that the parties to it have not a mutual resemblance. There must be a basis of agreement, but the structure reared upon it may contain a thousand disparities."

"We stand like a race with shrunken muscles, staring helplessly at the weights our forefathers easily lifted."

"The curious thing is that the more the mind takes in, the more it has space for, and that all one's ideas are like the Irish people at home who live in the different corners of a room and take boarders."

"True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out — you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand."

"Cecilia had moreover a turn for sarcasm, and her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it."

"Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind."

"So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!"

"Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."

"If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land."

"The full, the monstrous demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian."

"It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process."

"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."

"I still, in presence of life... have reactions — as many as possible... It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions — appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing — and I do. I believe I shall do yet again — it is still an act of life."

"We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art...what we are talking about — and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth — I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace."

"I'm glad you like adverbs — I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect."

"He is outside of everything, and an alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window."

"Vereker’s secret, my dear man — the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet."

"The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending."

"The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be?"

"Print it as it stands — beautifully."

"She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities."

"We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

"However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like — not even (one braces one's self to risk the declaration) a particular kind of writing."

"The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument."

"The practice of "reviewing"… in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism."

"The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman."

"To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived — to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that — this doubtless is the right way to live."

"If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?"

"A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it."

"There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition."

"Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors."

"I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme."

"There are bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad manners organized."

"My choice is the old world — my choice, my need, my life."

"Cats and monkeys — monkeys and cats — all human life is there!"

"Deep experience is never peaceful."

"It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe."

"The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination... To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master."

"If you say that this is absurd, that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such person know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd."

"As a therapist, Jeanna Eichenbaum works deep in trenches of the LGBTQQI community, offering trauma therapy as well as psychedelic integration support, which she has been trained in extensively...She said one of the qualities of religious experience as described by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience is, "A feeling that one has somehow encountered "the true self" (a sense that mystical experiences reveal the nature of our true, cosmic self: one that is beyond life and death, beyond difference and duality, and beyond ego and selfishness.""

"Suppose Jonathan Edwards had been born a woman; suppose William James, for that matter, had been born a woman? (The invalid seclusion of his sister Alice is suggestive.) Even from men, New England took its psychic toll; many of its geniuses seemed peculiar in one way or another, particularly along the lines of social intercourse...Emily Dickinson-viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as "partially cracked," by the twentieth century as fey or pathological-has increasingly struck me as a practical woman, exercising her gift as she had to, making choices."

"He was inventive and he was positive, quick to affirm the latest ideas that flashed upon him without asking the consent of the ideas which he had already affirmed--- more concerned with the new wine than the old bottles. Nevertheless there is in James's thought that unconscious self-consistency which is the miracle of creative minds."

"If the vapid writings . . . did indeed emanate from him, I can only say that this implies a terrible post-mortem reduction of personal capacities. (Survival of death with such an appalling decay of personality makes it, at least to me, a rather unattractive prospect.)"

"Philosophy to him was rather like a maze in which he happened to find himself wandering, and what he was looking for was the way out."

"The dogma is one of repetition; a ritual nonsense is uttered, in a loud voice; and suitable tests for the conforming of other scientists and the rest of the citizenry are performed by these, who-working scientists, educators, politicians, critics of all forms-now will swear they are behaving scientifically. William James met one such, in the person of a lady from Boston. As F. O. Matthiessen tells it, James was presenting one of his lucid, cogent arguments, and paused to say ironically, "That is like asking 'What holds the world up?"" The lady from Boston, impatient with all the talk, answered with clipped decision, "A rock." James wanted to take this farther-"What holds the rock up?" he asked. The lady said, "Another rock." "And that rock," James pursued, "what holds it up?" The lady stiffened. "Young man," she said in a voice that a dog-hater might use on an off-bounds Pekinese, "let me make myself clear: it's rocks, all the way!""

"Ruburt tuned in to the world view of a man known dead. He was not directly in communication with William James. He was aware, however, of the universe through William James' world view. As you might tune into a program on a television set, Ruburt tuned into the view of reality now held in the mind of William James. Because that view necessarily involved emotions, Ruburt felt some sense of emotional contact — but only with the validity of the emotions. Each person has such a world view, whether living or dead in your terms, and that "living picture" exists despite tome or space. It can be perceived by others."

"Little is written about revolutionaries, let alone Jews who became atheists, "idealists," some people might term them, not "realists." I like to quote William James, who said, "The world can and has been changed by those to whom the ideal and the real are dynamically contiguous." It was their struggle to do this and make needed changes."

"I revelled in the keen analysis of William James, Josiah Royce and young George Santayana. But it was James with his pragmatism and Albert Bushnell Hart with his research method, that turned me back from the lovely but sterile land of philosophic speculation, to the social sciences as the field for gathering and interpreting that body of fact which would apply to my program for the Negro. As undergraduate, I had talked frankly with William James about teaching philosophy, my major subject. He discouraged me, not by any means because of my record in his classes. He used to give me A's and even A-plus, but as he said candidly, there is "not much chance for anyone earning a living as a philosopher.""

"The American psychologist William James discussed consciousness at some length. In his monumental work The Principles of Psychology... he described five properties of what he called "thought." Every thought, he wrote, tends to be part of personal consciousness. Thought is always changing, is sensibly continuous, and appears to deal with objects independent of itself. In addition, thought focuses on some objects to the exclusion of others. In other words, it involves attention. Of attention he wrote, in an oft-quoted passage: "Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several possible objects or trains of thought. ...It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others."