“According to my principles, every master has his true and certain value. Praise and criticism cannot change any of that.”
Response to a story in the European Magazine which had accused him of harshly criticizing Joseph Haydn (14 September 1785), as quoted in Haydn, A Documentary Study (1981) by Howard Chandler Robbins Landon, p. 88
Context: According to my principles, every master has his true and certain value. Praise and criticism cannot change any of that. Only the work itself praises and criticizes the master, and therefore I leave to everyone his own value.
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Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach 3
German harpsichordist and composer 1714–1788Related quotes

“For changes to be of any true value, they've got to be lasting and consistent.”

Witold Doroszewski, Elements of lexicology and semiotics. Vol. 46. Mouton, 1973. p. 36-37

1790s, First Principles of Government (1795)
Context: It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.

Letter to James Hessey (October 9, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

“True artists, turned critics, think also less of rules than of values.”
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

The He-Ancient, in Pt. V
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)