"Self-criticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... growing conviction that prejudice and intuition are not enough, the working out of realistic opinion, which takes time, money, labor, conscious effort, patience, and equanimity, will not find enough support. That conviction grows as self-criticism increases, and makes us conscious of buncombe, contemptuous of ourselves when we employ it, and on guard to detect it. Without an ingrained habit of analyzing opinion when we read, talk, and decide, most of us would hardly suspect the need of better ideas, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... story will scarcely push their friendship so far that they will refrain from criticism upon myself and my doings. On one point, viz. the social morality of my conduct, I am so sure of criticism that I will anticipate it with self-criticism. Had I the moral right to desert the city, and to ignore the social obligations of the city, in order to find a life that was more pleasurable to myself? A city which presents a depressing variety of social needs can hardly afford to spare any good citizen, however ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... at a penny a line, or commercial moralists with axes to grind. In the end we became fatheaded, and not only lost all intellectual consciousness of what we were doing, and with it all power of objective self-criticism, but stacked up a lumber of pious praises for ourselves which not only satisfied our corrupted and half atrophied consciences, but gave us a sense that there is something extraordinarily ungentlemanly and politically dangerous in bringing these pious phrases to the test of conduct. We carried ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... self-criticism was given me by a very kind and, to the best of my belief, sincere letter from Suvorin. I began to think of writing something decent, but I still had no faith in my being any good as a writer. And then, unexpected and ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... country who are not fooled by themselves, who are capable of self-criticism, self-confession and self-discipline, ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... splendour of language rarely equalled by any of our poets. But it required his poetic fire to be at fusing point to enable him to burst through his natural tendency to prolixity and even dulness. His extraordinary lack of humour and the, perhaps consequent, imperfect power of self-criticism by which it was accompanied, together with the theory of poetic theme and diction with which he hampered himself, led him into a frequent choice of trivial subjects and childish language which excited not unjust ridicule, and long delayed the ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... himself, profitably leave the catastrophe he has created to make its own impression. The artistic demand in the form of work to which his instinct draws him is heavier than in any other. It is simply to be white-hot in purpose and stone-cold in self-criticism at ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... classical age. But the ages before and after had no belief in such a lesson. The old Medicine-Man was perhaps himself the first Theos. At any rate the primeval kings and queens were treated as divine.[152:2] Just for a few great generations, it would seem, humanity rose to a sufficient height of self-criticism and self-restraint to reject these dreams of self-abasement or megalomania. But the effort was too great for the average world; and in a later age nearly all the kings and rulers—all people in fact who can command an adequate number of flatterers—become divine beings again. Let ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... Plato, he saw fit to write them down. One may question if such scepticism is in itself unusual, whether any large proportion of great statesmen, great ecclesiastics and administrators have escaped phases of destructive self-criticism of destructive criticism of the principles upon which their general careers were framed. But few have made so public an admission as Sir Thomas More. A good Catholic undoubtedly he was, and yet we find ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... the numerous exhibitions of that over-sensitiveness to criticism which caused him such long and continued suffering. His mind was like a bared nerve, quivering with delight or contracting with violent pain. Utterly devoid, as he was, of self-criticism, he regarded his authorship as something miraculous, and held God (who apparently supervised each chapter) responsible for the fate of his books. "If the Lord," he writes in solemn earnest to a friend, "will take as good care of the remainder ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... natural humour he has attained a power of self-appreciation which is unerring. The Satires are full from end to end of himself and his own affairs; but the name of egoism cannot be applied to any self-revelation or self-criticism which is so just and so certain. From the opening lines of the first satire, where he notes the faults of his own earlier work, to the last line of the book, with its Parthian shot at Canidia and the jeunesse ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... lapse into sincerity and bald self-criticism were intentional, calculated, or not, she was undoubtedly quick to see and profit by the opening which Damaris' ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... so good. All but idolaters acknowledge a certain boyishness in him—a boyishness which is in fact no mean source contributary of his charm in verse. It is perhaps not always quite so charming in prose, and especially in letters. You do not want self-criticism of an obviously second-thought kind in them. But you do want that less obtrusive variety which prevents them from appearing unkempt, "down-at-heel" etc. Perhaps there is, at any rate in the earlier letters, something of this unkemptness in Keats ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... and a person sent his excuses for not going to visit him, answered: "I cannot reproach a person for not visiting me, whom I myself should not go to visit were he sick." Modern would-be wits might take the hint; for with candour so scarce, and self-criticism usually ending in a verdict of complete innocence, the blurted naked truth, not unaccompanied by a sidelong thrust at the speaker's own fallibility, would ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... were penned on the threshold of the new era of the eighties. The exponent of Jewish self-criticism lived to see not only the horrors of the pogroms but also the misty dawn of the national movement, and he could comfort himself with the conviction that he was destined to be the singer ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... of an involuntary vigilance in her, which could not leave his motives any more than his actions unsearched. But in her conditioning she could not repent; she could only offer him at some other time the unconscious reparation of her obedience. The self-criticism which the child has not learned she had forgotten, but in her oblivion the wish to please existed as perfectly as in the ignorance ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells |
