Quotes to inspire and reflect

A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature.

Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius.

They who are to be judges must also be performers.

The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot love any one of them.

Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him.

We every day and every hour say things of another that we might more properly say of ourselves, could we but apply our observations to our own concerns.

I don’t care how unkind the things people say about me so / long as they don’t say them to my face.

The greater one’s love for a person the less room for flattery. The proof of true love is to be unsparing in criticism.

Men are ready to suffer anything from others or from heaven itself, provided that, when it comes to words, they are untouched.

You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.

I do not resent criticism, even when, for the sake of emphasis, it parts for the time with reality.

Nationwide thinking, nationwide planning and nationwide action are the three great essentials to prevent nationwide crises for future generations to struggle through.

Great crises produce great men and great deeds of courage.

I can still hear my mother wailing over some new kitchen crisis, “Oh God,” and my father answering cozily from the silo, “Were you calling me, dear?"

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

Fear succeeds crime—it -is its punishment.

Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.

When a felon’s not engaged in his employment, / Or maturing his felonious little plans, / His capacity for innocent enjoyment / Is just as great as any honest man’s.

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. There is no such thing as concealment.

The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.

There exists among the intolerably degraded the perverse and powerful desire to force into the arena of the actual those fantastic crimes of which they have been accused, achieving their vengeance and their own destruction through making the nightmare real.

Expulsion and genocide, though both are international offenses, must remain distinct; the former is an offense against fellow-nations, whereas the latter is an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the "human status” without which the very words “mankind" or "humanity” would be devoid of meaning.

There is no doctrine will do good where nature is wanting.

It is only in the lonely emergencies of life that our creed is tested: then routine maxims fail, and we fall back on our gods.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square: but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.

Three hours of writing require twenty hours of preparation. Luckily I have learned to dream about the work, which saves me some working time.

The artist finds a greater pleasure in painting than in having completed the picture.

If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.

He who does not know how to create should not know.

I will work out the divinity that is busy within my mind / and tend the means that are mine.

We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.

In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down hill.

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.

Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncan’s death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?

Man, like Deity, creates in his own image.

Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.

Nature is a rag merchant, who works up every shred and ort and end into new creations.

God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.

Every production must resemble its author.

The noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men, which have sought to express the images of their minds, where those of their bodies have failed.

In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.

A man has made great progress in cunning when he does not seem too clever to others.

The saving grace of all really great gifts is that the persons who bear their burden remain superior to what they have done, at least as long as the source of creativity is alive.

Let us be wary of ready-made ideas about cowardice and courage: the same burden weighs infinitely more heavily on some shoulders than on others.

No man gains credit for his cowardly courtesies.