
“There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.”
Book One, Chapter XIII.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book One
“There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.”
The Well-Tempered Critic, p. 140
"Quotes"
Context: The fundamental act of criticism is a disinterested response to a work of literature in which all one's beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, stampedings of pity and terror, are ordered to be quiet. We are now dealing with the imaginative, not the existential, with the "let this be," not with "this is," and no work of literature is better by virtue of what it says than any other work.
Source: Short fiction, The Fairy Chessmen (1946), Chapter 4 (p. 29)
La critique souvent n'est pas une science; c'est un métier, où il faut plus de santé que d'esprit, plus de travail que de capacité, plus d'habitude que de génie. Si elle vient d'un homme qui ait moins de discernement que de lecture, et qu'elle s'exerce sur de certains chapitres, elle corrompt et les lecteurs et l'écrivain.
Aphorism 63
Les Caractères (1688), Des Ouvrages de l'Esprit
The Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910-11) vol. 17, p. 268.
Criticism
"The Scientific Revolution and the Machine"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)