I have just transferred this from my Playwiths blog to here. Since i posted it there, it has slipped into my now-published commonplace book, Sign on the Dotted Lion, available from Amazon as an e-book (recommended), or as a dead-tree book. It would make a very suitable Christmas present for people who like a bit of savagery.
If I have sent this before, so be it. I just came across the Radulph quote while reading on a bus. After I recovered from a snorting attack, I recalled that I had previously filed it.
Then I found all of this lot. I must have had more spare time, back then.
Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honour of a critic.
— Jan Sibelius (1865 – 1957) (attrib.)
— J. B. Priestley, Literature and Western Man, Mercury Books, 1962, 146.
Kierkegaard is very queer, I think. I read some selections in German last year, and a French translation … a very odd and good book.
— Aldous Huxley, letter to Edward Sackville-West, 1932, Letters of Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, 1969, 356.
[Macaulay] has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.
— Sydney Smith (1771 – 1845)
Thou should’st be living at this hour,
Milton, and enjoying power.
England hath need of thee and not
Of Leavis and of Eliot.
— Heathcote William Garrod.
You ought to be roasted alive, not that even well-cooked you would be to my taste.
— J. M. Barrie, to George Bernard Shaw, in response to GBS’s criticism of his plays.
In his variations on the Paganini theme, Brahms is commenting subtly on physics and dynamics, including light-hearted references to Boyle’s Law and Fletcher’s Trolley.
— Basil Boothroyd (1910 – 1988), quoted by Frank Muir, The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose.
A good deal of Teilhard is nonsense, but on further reflection I can see it as a dotty, euphoristic kind of nonsense, very greatly preferable to solemn long-faced Germanic nonsense. There is no real harm in it. But what, I wonder, was the origin of the philosophically self-destructive belief that obscurity makes a prima-facie case for profundity? — the origin, I mean, of the comically fallacious syllogism that runs Profound reasoning is difficult to understand; this work is difficult to understand; therefore this work is profound.
— Sir Peter Medawar ( ), Plutos’s Republic, introduction, 21.
The harm Kant unwittingly did to philosophy was to make obscurity seem respectable. From Kant on, any petty metaphysician might hope to be given credit for profundity if what he said was almost impossible to follow.
— Sir Peter Medawar ( ), Plutos’s Republic, introduction, 22.
Schopenhauer: A German; very deep; but it was not really noticeable when he sat down.
— Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), Literary Lapses (1910)
When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.’
— Hilaire Belloc (1870 – 1953), ‘On His Books’ in Stories Essays and Poems, Everyman Library 948, 1957, 413.
De la Beche is a DIRTY DOG,— THERE IS PLAIN English & there is no mincing the matter. I knew him to be a thorough jobber & a great intriguer & we have proved him to be thoroughly incompetent to carry on the survey … He writes in one style to you and in another to me … I confess that a very little matter would prevent my having further intercourses with De la B. If I can trace to him the origin of those falsehoods he shall smart.
— Sir Roderick Impey Murchison (1792 – 1871), quoted in Rudwick, The Great Devonian Conspiracy, University of Chicago 1985, 194.
— C. P. Snow (1905 – 1980), The Case of Leavis and the Serious Case, 1970.
Victor Hugo was really a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.
— Anon., quoted by J. B. Priestley, Literature and Western Man, Mercury Books, 1962, 132.
Born in Warsaw in 1838 and died there in 1861, aged twenty-three. In this brief lifetime she accomplished, perhaps, more than any composer who ever lived, for she provided the piano of absolutely every tasteless sentimental person in the so-called civilized world with a piece of music which that person, however unaccomplished in a dull technical sense, could play. It is probable that if the market stalls and back-street music shops of Britain were to be searched The Maiden’s Prayer would be found to be still selling, and as for the Empire at large, Messrs. Allan of Melbourne reported in 1924, sixty years after the death of the composer, that their house alone was still disposing of 10,000 copies a year.
— Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, 9th edition, 1955, 64.
…one, the notoriously unreliable monk Radulph Glaber (the wildness of whose imagination was rivalled only by that of his private life, which gives him a fair claim to have been expelled from more monasteries than any other littérateur of the eleventh century)…
— John Julius Norwich, The Normans in the South, 1016–1130, 1992.
Andrade is like an inverted Micawber, waiting for something to turn down.
— Sir Henry Tizard (1885 – 1959), recalled by C. Snow (1905 – 1980), Science and Government, 1960.
The hatchet is buried for the present: but the handle is conveniently near the surface.
— Sir Henry Tizard (1885 – 1959) on Lord Cherwell, recalled by C. Snow (1905 – 1980), Science and Government, 1960.
I have no doubt of your courage, Sir Robert, though you have of mine; but then consider what different lives we have led, and what a school of courage is that troop of Yeomanry at Tamworth — the Tory fencibles! Who can doubt of your courage who has seen you at their head, marching up Pitt Street through Dundas Square onto Liverpool Lane? … the very horses looking at you as if you were going to take away 3 per cent. of their oats. After such spectacles as these, the account you give of your own courage cannot be doubted …
— Sydney Smith (1771 – 1845), in a letter to Sir Robert Peel, June 20, 1842, quoted in Charles Mackay (ed.), A Thousand and One Gems of English Prose (n.d.), 400
— William Dean Howells (1837 – 1920).
— Sir Peter Medawar (1915 – 1987), Plutos’s Republic, introduction, 22.
