“A good critic is the sorcerer who makes some hidden spring gush forth unexpectedly under our feet.”

—  Francois Mauriac

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Francois Mauriac photo
Francois Mauriac 38
French author 1885–1970

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“Our party has a mass character, and hundreds of thousands of member. Owing to the situation in our country the bulk of Party members spring from the petty bourgeoisie. There is nothing surprising in it. IN the beginning under the influence of bourgeois ideology the stand of some Party members may lack firmness, their outlook may be confused and their thinking not quite correct, but owing to the fact that they have been tempered in the revolution and the war of resistance, our Party members are by and large good militants, faithful to the Party and the revolution. Those Comrades know that those Party members who commit errors will lead the masses into error; therefore, they stand ready to correct any mistake they may make, and this in a timely way, and do not allow small errors accumulate into big ones. They sincerely practice criticism and self-criticism, which makes it possible for them to progress together.”

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1950's, On Revolutionary Morality (1958)

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“It is always becoming something else and those who criticize it and the acts done under it, as well as those who praise, help to make it what it will be tomorrow.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

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Context: If this statement by Judge Cooley is true, and the authority for it is unimpeachable, then the theory that the Constitution is a written document is a legal fiction. The idea that it can be understood by a study of its language and the history of its past development is equally mythical. It is what the Government and the people who count in public affairs recognize and respect as such, what they think it is. More than this. It is not merely what it has been, or what it is today. It is always becoming something else and those who criticize it and the acts done under it, as well as those who praise, help to make it what it will be tomorrow.

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“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.”

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Context: I've noticed that there is not necessarily a great relationship between what the majority of critics have to say and what is actually true. Some of them are so busy trying to mold the public taste according to the limits of their perceptions, and others are so busy reflecting what they consider to be the public taste — that view limited again by their perception. 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.

“Yet true it is, as cow chews cud
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Except wind stands as never it stood,
It is an ill wind turns none to good.”

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“It is not good to settle into a set of opinions. It is a mistake to put forth effort and obtain some understanding and then stop at that.”

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Hagakure (c. 1716)
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Very often attributed to Addison, this is in fact by Hugh Blair, published in Blair's Sermons (1815), Vol. 1, pp. 196-197.
Misattributed

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