There is a disease to which plays as well as men become liable with advancing years. In men it is called doting, in plays dating. ...The more topical the play the more it dates.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It does not follow ... that the right to criticize Shakespeare involves the power of writing better plays. And in fact--do not be ...surprised at my modesty--I do not profess to write better plays.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crime...s of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pain itself can be pleasurable accidentally in so far as it is accompanied by wonder, as in stage-plays; or in so far as it recall...s a beloved object to one's memory, and makes one feel one's love for the thing, whose absence gives us pain. Consequently, since love is pleasant, both pain and whatever else results from love, in so far as they remind us of our love, are pleasant.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One kind of justice is that which is manifested in distributions of honour or money or the other things that fall to be divided am...ong those who have a share in the constitution ... and another kind is that which plays a rectifying part in transactions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of a British man's constitution. His thoughts and beauties ar...e so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct.--No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays, without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »