Samuel Johnson Quotes

Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected.

True science teaches, above all, to doubt

You find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic. But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or uninformed, intelligent of stupid -- but most people don't take the trouble.

A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.

Criticism is like champagne, nothing more execrable if bad, nothing more excellent if good.

Criticism is as often a trade as a science, requiring, as it does, more health than wit, more labour than capacity, more practice than genius.

But what is criticism? Criticism is purely destructive; anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up.

My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.

Criticism is like many other things, it drags along after what has already been said and doesn't get out of its rut.

Worship the spirit of criticism. If reduced to itself it is not an awakener of ideas or a stimulant to great things, but, without it, everything is fallible; it always has the last word.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.

You have to test your hypothesis against other theories. Certainty in the face of complex situations is very dangerous.

It is not his possession of knowledge, of irrefutable truth, that makes the man of science, but his persistent and recklessly critical quest for truth.

Science must begin with myths and with the criticism of myth.

We cannot infer that because sciences of things divine and human are full of controversies and quarrels, therefore their whole subject-matter is uncertain ; for there have been many persons so enamoured of contradiction, as to turn into ridicule geometrical axioms.

To me the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet. That I haven’t understood enough. That I can’t know enough. That I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom… Those who tell you that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority: don’t think of that as a gift. Think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside, however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Science makes no claim to infallibility; it leaves that claim to be made by theologians.

The one thing I do find about serious reviews is that usually they tend to have a point, and that's what I find hurt so much about discerning critics. If the reviews hurt they're probably right on some level.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!

Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who enters a ship without a helm or a compass, and who never can be certain whither he is going.