BY JUANURREA
On art criticism
• Smugness is always delicious in literature.
• Why should the artist be disturbed by the strident clamor of criticism? Why do those who cannot create assume the right to judge the value of creative work?
• The Greeks were a nation of art critics.
• The most perfect art is the one that best reflects man in all his infinite variety
• Writing has done a lot of harm to writers. We have to go back to the voice.
• The constructive genius of the Greeks was lost in a sea of criticism.
• Plato was the first to stir in the soul of man a still unsatisfied desire: the desire to know the relationship between beauty and truth, and the place that beauty occupies within the moral and intellectual order of the cosmos.
• Who but a Greek could have analyzed art so well?
• Everything that is modern in our lives we owe to the Greeks, and everything that is anachronistic is due to medievalism.
• Without critical faculty there is no artistic creation worthy of such a name.
• A great poet makes poetry because he chooses to make it.
• There is no great art without conscious effort, and awareness and critical thinking are the same thing.
• Shakespeare worked with chronicles and plays and novels, but that was just raw material, and he was the one who took it and shaped it into song. They became his because he made them beautiful. He built them with the music of poetry, and they had no construction, and so they were built for eternity.
On the critique of life
• The English public tends to feel comfortable when a mediocre person speaks to them.
• People who talk about others tend to be boring, but when they talk about themselves they are almost always interesting.
• Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are utterly obnoxious.
• Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
• I am all too aware of being born in a century where only the boring is treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.
• Education is an admirable thing, but from time to time it is worth remembering that nothing worth knowing can be taught.
• The thought is wonderful, but even more wonderful is the adventure.
• Ever since the printing press appeared, the fatal habit of reading developed among the lower and middle classes.
• Cigarettes have the charm of leaving you unsatisfied.
• The only use of embassy attachés is to provide excellent tobacco to their friends.
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