Others

Modest doubt is call’d the beacon of the wise.

Dreams nourish the soul just as food nourishes the body.

No great discovery was ever made in science except by one who lifted his nose above the grindstone of details and ventured on a more comprehensive vision.

I know perfectly well the cynic is a coward. He foresees all barrenness so that barrenness can never surprise him.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.

Someone has said that conversation is sex for the soul.

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man’s observation, not overturning it.

This was really a compliment to be pleased with— a nice little handsome pat of butter made up by a neat-handed . . . dairy-maid instead of the grease fit only for cartwheels which one is dosed with by the pound.

A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.

Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.

Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in light out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.

Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.

Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

By bedside and easy chair, books promise a cozy, swift, and silent release from this world into another, with no current involved but the free and scarcely detectable crackle of brain cells.

A book should serve as an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.

There are books . . . which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

The spirituals and the blues were not created out of sweet deceit. Spirituals and blues contain sublimated bitterness and humility, pathos and bewilderment.

To read good books is like holding a conversation with the most eminent minds of past centuries and, moreover, a studied conversation in which these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.