Reviewing bad books is bad for the character — WH Auden

Harold Bloom
About This Quote

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden If you focus on the negative, you see it all. This quote is saying that when you only look at the good in people and positive aspects of them, there is very little to criticize. If you spend your time doing this, you will never learn about their weaknesses, which are often what make them who they are.

Source: The Western Canon: The Books And School Of The Ages

Some Similar Quotes
  1. A half-read book is a half-finished love affair. - David Mitchell
  2. If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open,... - Italo Calvino
  3. We shouldn't teach great books we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement. - B.F. Skinner
  4. Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live. - Gustave Flaubert
  5. People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. - Logan Pearsall Smith
More Quotes By Harold Bloom
  1. (Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God.
  2. Everyone wants a prodigy to fail it makes our mediocrity more bearable.
  3. (Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.
  4. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.
  5. Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.
Related Topics