“I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don’t know where I would be without it.”
Letter, (1950); as quoted in Thomas Mann — The Birth of Criticism (1987) by Marcel Reich-Ranicki
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Thomas Mann 159
German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate 1875–1955Related quotes
On Jean-Luc Godard in an interview with John Simon (1971).
Context: In this profession, I always admire people who are going on, who have a sort of idea and, however crazy it is, are putting it through; they are putting people and things together, and they make something. I always admire this. But I can't see his pictures. I sit for perhaps twenty-five or thirty or fifty minutes and then I have to leave, because his pictures make me so nervous. I have the feeling the whole time that he wants to tell me things, but I don't understand what it is, and sometimes I have the feeling that he's bluffing, double-crossing me.
Source: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
“The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.”
“Poirot," I said. "I have been thinking."
"An admirable exercise my friend. Continue it.”
Source: Peril at End House
Preface
1920s, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920)
“When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”
Variant: When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.