“The Victorians have been immoderately praised, and immoderately blamed, and surely it is time we formed some reasonable picture of them?”

—  Robertson Davies

The Girl with the Swansdown Seat/Abode of Love/1848 (1956).
Context: The Victorians have been immoderately praised, and immoderately blamed, and surely it is time we formed some reasonable picture of them? There was their courageous, intellectually adventurous side, their greedy and inhuman side, their superbly poetic side, their morally pretentious side, their tea and buttered toast side, and their champagne and Skittles side. Much like ourselves, in fact, though rather dirtier.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The Victorians have been immoderately praised, and immoderately blamed, and surely it is time we formed some reasonable…" by Robertson Davies?
Robertson Davies photo
Robertson Davies 282
Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and nov… 1913–1995

Related quotes

Hippocrates photo

“[O]f articles of food, those which are unsuitable and hurtful to man when administered, every one is either bitter… or saltish or acid, or something else intense and strong, and therefore we are disordered by them… But all those things of which a man eats and drinks are devoid of any such intense and well-marked quality… which man is accustomed to use for food, with the exception of condiments and confectionaries, which are made to gratify the palate and for luxury. And from those things, when received into the body abundantly, there is no disorder nor dissolution of the powers belonging to the body; but strength, growth, and nourishment… for no other reason than because they are well mixed, have no thing in them of an immoderate character, nor anything strong, but the whole forms… [of] simple and not strong substance.”

Hippocrates (-460–-370 BC) ancient Greek physician

p, 125
Ancient Medicine

Plutarch photo

“Neither blame or praise yourself.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher
Simone de Beauvoir photo

“It is vain to apportion praise and blame.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex

The Second Sex (1949)
Context: It is vain to apportion praise and blame. The truth is that if the vicious circle is so hard to break, it is because the two sexes are each the victim at once of the other and of itself. Between two adversaries confronting each other in their pure liberty, an agreement could be easily reached: the more so as the war profits neither. But the complexity of the whole affair derives from the fact that each camp is giving aid and comfort to the enemy; woman is pursuing a dream of submission, man a dream of identification. Want of authenticity does not pay: each blames the other for the unhappiness he or she has incurred in yielding to the temptations of the easy way; what man and woman loathe in each other is the shattering frustration of each one's own bad faith and baseness.

Clement of Alexandria photo

“Men who offer laudatory speeches to the rich … are insidious because, although mere abundance is by itself quite enough to puff up the souls of its possessors, and to corrupt them, and to turn them aside from the way by which salvation can be reached, these men bring fresh delusion to the minds of the rich by exciting them with the pleasures that come from their immoderate praises, and by rendering them contemptuous of absolutely everything in the world except the wealth which is the cause of their being admired. In the words of the proverb, they carry fire to fire, when they shower pride upon pride, and heap on wealth, heavy by its own nature, the heavier burden of arrogance.”

Clement of Alexandria (150–215) Christian theologian

Source: The Rich Man's Salvation, p. 271.

“Some of the pictures I work on a long time and they look as if I've knocked them out, you know, and there are other pictures that come off right away. The immediacy can be accomplished in a picture that's been worked on for a long time just as well as if it's been done rapidly, you see. But I don't find that any of these things prove anything really.”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

n.p.
1960's, Living Art, 1963

William Winwood Reade photo

“The one, the outstanding, dramatic, imaginative, historical picture of life, to be inspired by Victorian science.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

V. S. Pritchett in The New Statesman and Nation vol. 25 (1943), p. 323.
Criticism of The Martyrdom of Man

Camille Pissarro photo

“I brought Durand eight pictures, among them my 'Sunset' and the motif done from my window. They have been praised, but I find them poor, - tame, grey, monotonous, - I am not at all satisfied. - I am working with fury and I have finally discovered the right execution, the search for which has tormented me for a year. I am pretty sure I have it now, all I need is to spend this coming autumn in Rouen or in some other place where I can find striking motifs.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Pissarro, from Osny, February 1884, in a letter to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 61
1880's

“…in this world, often, there is nothing to praise but no one to blame…”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“On Preparing to Read Kipling”, p. 135
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

Auguste Rodin photo

“If in looking at a picture you have been profoundly moved by it, but have not noticed the color or drawing, you may be sure that they are technically perfect.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

RODIN, AUGUSTE. L'Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell, 1911

Related topics