Critics From The United Kingdom

"I haven't seen this chap's boots yet, but I should say from his knock he's a good opinion of himself."

"Be speedy, for I was born under a thirsty star."

"You did late review my lays, Crusty Christopher; You did mingle blame and praise, Rusty Christopher. When I learnt from whom it came, I forgave you all the blame, Musty Christopher; I could _not_ forgive the praise, Fusty Christopher."

"Music is the universal language of mankind."

"Theodore Watts, as he told me twenty years ago, holds the opinion that Shakespeare wrote private poetry in a separate book while composing his dramas, and that he gave such portions of it as he could make fit, to certain of his characters. He thought, if I remember aright that the soliloquy and the dagger-scence were morsels of this sort. It certainly must strike one that the "the law's delay" and "the insolence of office" were not prominent grievances in Hamlet's career."

"Man's knowledge, save before his fellow man, Is ignorance—his widest wisdom folly."

"Yon silvery billows breaking on the beach Fall back in foam beneath the star-shine clear, The while my rhymes are murmuring in your ear A restless lore like that the billows teach; For on these sonnet-waves my soul would reach From its own depths, and rest within you, dear, As, through the billowy voices yearning here Great nature strives to find a human speech.A sonnet is a wave of melody: From heaving waters of the impassion'd soul A billow of tidal music one and whole Flows in the "octave"; then, returning free, Its ebbing surges in the "sestet" roll Back to the deeps of Life's tumultuous sea."

"We looked o'er London, where men wither and choke, Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and skies, And lore of woods and wild wind prophecies, Yea, every voice that to their fathers spoke."

"When hope lies dead—ah, when 'tis death to live, And wrongs remembered make the heart still bleed, Better are Sleep's kind lies for Life's blind need Than truth, if lies a little peace can give."

"Patient, dramatic, serious, genial, From over to over the game goes on, Weaving a pattern of hardy perennial, Civilisation under the sun."

"It is possible, in the interests of a false religion (such as Nationalism or Fascism) to avert one's eyes from the plain fact of human brotherhood; but the fact stubbornly remains, and we ignore it at our peril. We are all in the same boat, and we live in the shadow of a common doom."

"My Lord Archbishop, what a scold you are! And when your man is down, how bold you are! Of charity how oddly scant you are! How Lang O Lord, how full of Cantuar!"

"Poetry . . . has nothing to do with facts, though everything to do with truth."

"A male Horace Walpole."

"It is an old belief That on some solemn shore Beyond the sphere of grief Dear friends shall meet once more."

"Barring drink and the girls, I ne'er heard of a sin – Many worse, better few, than bright, broken Maginn."

"It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John, back to "plasters, pills, and ointment boxes," &c. But, for Heaven's sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry."

"Here lies the peerless paper lord, Lord Peter, Who broke the laws of God and man, and metre."

"It is strange that no one seems to think it at all necessary to say a single word about another new school of poetry which has of late sprung up among us. This school has not, I believe, as yet received any name; but if I may be permitted to have the honour of christening it, it may henceforth be referred to by the designation of The Cockney School."

"Lockhart's Life of Walter Scott may be said to be the most admirable biography in the English language, after Boswell's Samuel Johnson."

"We thought it impossible any publication could raise Sir Walter Scott's talents or character in public opinion or in our private opinion more especially. And yet you certainly have raised high as ever biographer raised his hero — And you have done it without one word of puff or exaggeration or even full-faced eulogy. Sir Walter Scott himself would say — “Well done — my good son.”"

"A singular relation...grew up between Carlyle and Lockhart. They lived in different circles; they did not meet often, or correspond often; but Carlyle ever after spoke of Lockhart as he seldom spoke of any man; and such letters of Lockhart's to Carlyle as survive show a trusting confidence extremely remarkable in a man who was so chary of his esteem."

"As Leslie Stephen has demonstrated, to suppress one truth is to suppress all truth, for truth is a coherent whole."

"Although Stephen was apt to be too apologetic for intruding his opinions upon readers who were anxious to hear them, it is proper that every man should apologise for writing about Shakespeare. ... But it would have been a great loss to all lovers of good literature if Stephen had not, at the close of his life, overcome his diffidence and given us his forty-four pages on 'Shakespeare as a Man.'"

"The fool who does not know his own folly may be doing nothing, and the philosopher who is trying to darken knowledge may be doing worse than nothing; but every sincere attempt to grapple with real difficulties made by a man not utterly incompetent has its value."

"We can no longer be content with refuting our opponents; we are also bound to explain them. The vitality of any doctrine supposed to be erroneous proves that it cannot be entirely erroneous."

"The poet should touch our heart by showing his own"

"If you wish at once to do nothing and to be respectable now-a-days, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study."

"Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season."

"He called individuals the tissue of society and stated that they are only relatively independent of the social body. Morality is distorted by and does not consider, first of all, the interests of the individual. Stephen claimed that pleasure must be accounted for by the conditions which make acts pleasant in specific cases. Survival in the evolutionary process, Stephen wrote, is more ultimate than pleasure, though men do not consciously realize this fact."

"Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens."

"Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh?"

"Philistine – a word which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the name applied by prigs to the rest of their species."

"The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact."

"A good talker, even more than a good orator, implies a good audience. Modern society is too vast and too restless to give a conversationalist a fair chance."

"He who sees only what is before his eyes sees the worst part of every view."

"If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries."

"The doctrine of toleration requires a positive as well as a negative statement. It is not only wrong to burn a man on account of his creed, but it is right to encourage the open avowal and defence of every opinion sincerely maintained. Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions."

"[Nature] only keeps us alive by a complicated system of the most shameful illusions, falsifying beyond rectification life, death, and after-death. Having made us take part in this poor puzzling game of life, she has taken care that all the rules shall be unfavourable to us: the cards are marked, the dice are loaded, we are always swindled. Thus years of hard work; and self-denial are frequently lost by a slip or chance, but seldom or never saved by a chance. Our health may be ruined by a pin-prick, but never doubled by an accident. We fall seriously ill in a moment, and take weeks or months to recover; lose a limb by some sudden mishap, but never by a good hap regain it. We cannot reach even a low degree of wisdom or knowledge without long hard study, while to be ignorant and foolish is the easiest and most natural thing in the world for us. Our sorrows are real and enduring; our joys deceptive and transient; our prizes of victory are not to be compared with our forfeits of defeat."

"The International League of Peace and Liberty, together with all other Peace Societies and Liberal Associations, Socialists, Communists, Internationalists, must feel assured that the new perfect man will not fight with his brother, for it will not be his "nature to," nor will he seek to oppress his brother, nor will it be possible to oppress himself; and they must also feel assured that when all mankind and womankind are perfect, all will be absolutely equal in every respect, that everybody will be delighted to share everything with everybody else, and that the earth wisely worked will produce far more than enough for the wants of her human children. Nor is it likely that this perfect man will rest content with merely making all human beings free and equal: his delicate moral sense will probably perceive that other animals have their inalienable rights no less than the human animal; that it is wicked to enslave horses, dogs, camels, elephants, reindeer, etc., for his pleasure and service; that it is criminal to rob the cow of her milk and the hen of her egg, thus defrauding the calf and preventing the life of the chick; that it is a shameful abuse of superior power to interfere in any way with that mode of life to which the nature of each animal impels it."

"The Vegetarians may confidently reckon that the new perfect man will not kill and devour other animals, nay, will not kill and devour vegetables, if it is cruel and wrong to do so. Should he after serious moral reflection conclude that vegetable life is as sacred as animal, he will doubtless be clever enough to derive plenty of wholesome food from the mineral kingdom; and should he deem it wrong to ravage even this for so vulgar a purpose as filling his belly, he will doubtless be able to nourish himself without devouring anything at all."

"[Nature] turns us out into the world without giving us any choice in the matter; though all other suffrages and freedoms are perfectly insignificant in comparison with that of which we are thus deprived, an effective and enlightened vote on the question: Shall I, or shall I not, be born?"

"And all sad scenes and thoughts and feelings vanish In that sweet sleep no power can ever banish, That one best sleep which never wakes again."

"The animals [nature] brings forth (not to speak of the plants and the minerals) are in many cases ugly, unamiable, ferocious, and tormented with monstrous appetites, which can only be satisfied by devouring their fellow-creatures; nearly all of them are quite selfish and immoral; and the few of them that are philanthropic (such as surly old lions, tigers, wolves, sharks, vultures and other sweet carrion fowl; all genuine lovers of man) are almost as disagreeably so as our human philanthropists themselves."

"But, so far as we can see, so long as the present laws and constitution of nature continue there must still remain a vast amount of really inevitable suffering for mankind, without reckoning beastkind, birdkind, fishkind, insectkind, reptilekind, plant- kind, and leaving quite out of discussion stonekind."

"The ignorant creature knows nothing of the wise doctrines of Malthus, but spawns forth as many children of all sorts as ever she can, without the least prudential restraint. She has consequently far more than she can properly feed and rear; so that a large part perishes in infancy (and we are told that none of these except the human sucklings will rise to another life; poor bereaved monkey and donkey mothers, for instance, being altogether without the precious consolations of immortality); a considerable part is eaten up by mankind and other hungry animals, and the remainder can seldom get food enough."

"As I came through the desert thus it was, As I came through the desert: All was black, In heaven no single star, on earth no track; A brooding hush without a stir or note; The air so thick it clotted in my throat."

"Yet I strode on austere; No hope could have no fear."

"The world rolls round for ever like a mill; It grinds out death and life and good and ill; It has no purpose, heart or mind or will."

"The City is of Night, but not of Sleep; There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain; The pitiless hours like years and ages creep, A night seems termless hell."