es, than of that which falls impotently on
the grave.--_Ruskin._

Certain critics resemble closely those people who when they would laugh
show ugly teeth.--_Joubert._

Every one is eagle-eyed to see another's faults and his
deformity.--_Dryden._

For I am nothing if not critical.--_Shakespeare._

He who stabs you in the dark with a pen would do the same with a
penknife, were he equally safe from detection and the
law.--_Quintilian._

Silence is the severest criticism.--_Charles Buxton._

All the other powers of literature are coy and haughty, they must be
long courted, and at last are not always gained; but criticism is a
goddess easy of access and forward of advance, she will meet the slow
and encourage the timorous. The want of meaning she supplies with words,
and the want of spirit she recompenses with malignity.--_Johnson._

It is a barren kind of criticism which tells you what a thing is
not.--_Rufus Griswold._

The legitimate aim of criticism is to direct attention to the excellent.
The bad will dig its own grave, and the imperfect may be safely left to
that final neglect from which no amount of present undeserved popularity
can rescue it.--_Bovee._

There are some critics who change everything that comes under their
hands to gold, but to this privilege of Midas they join sometimes his
ears!--_J. Petit Senn._

~Cruelty.~--Cruelty, the sign of currish kind.--_Spenser._

One of the ill effects of cruelty is that it makes the by-standers
cruel. How hard the English people grew in the time of Henry VIII. and
Bloody Mary.--_Charles Buxton._

Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.--_Burns._

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it
only requires opportunity.--_George Eliot._

~Cultivation.~--Cultivation is the economy of force.--_Liebig._

The highest purpose of intellectual cultivation is to give a man a
perfect knowledge and mastery of his own inner self; to render our
consciousness its own light and its own mirror. Hence there is the less
reason to be surprised at our inability to enter fully into the feelings
and characters of others. No one who has not a complete knowledge of
himself will ever have a true understanding of another.--_Novalis._

Neither the naked hand, nor the understanding, left to itself, can do
much; the work is accomplished by instruments and helps of which the
need is not less for the understanding than the hand.--_Bacon._