I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.

This is what is known as perspective, and it is a swindle.

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.

In criticism, I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.

Anyone who finds himself incapable of grasping the complexities of a work hides his withdrawal behind the most superficial pretext because he has not gotten past the surface.