“He who flatters a man is his enemy. he who tells him of his faults is his maker.”
“To mark a man's faults and failings was, for Johnson, to indicate where he had diverged from his true relation to God; for Strachey it was an agreeable intellectual pastime, which flattered his sense of superiority both to his subject and to the illusion-ridden mob.”
Hugh Kingsmill The Progress of a Biographer (1949) p. 7.
Criticism
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Lytton Strachey 11
British writer 1880–1932Related quotes
The Analects, The Doctrine of the Mean
Context: Earnest in practicing the ordinary virtues, and careful in speaking about them, if, in his practice, he has anything defective, the superior man dares not but exert himself; and if, in his words, he has any excess, he dares not allow himself such license. Thus his words have respect to his actions, and his actions have respect to his words; is it not just an entire sincerity which marks the superior man?
Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 284.
Context: It appeared that the one area in which Sir Bob excelled was anxiety. He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others’ mediocrity—suggesting that a certain kind of intelligence may at heart be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 453.
Jack R, Maguire, "Editorial: The Case for the C-Average Student", The Alcalde, September 1961, p. 5 http://books.google.com/books?id=qdIDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA5
Attributed
"Reflex Action and Theism"
1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 458.