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There should be a dash of the amateur in criticism. For the amateur is a man of enthusiasm who has not settled down and is not habit bound.

Brooks Atkinson

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Brooks Atkinson
Age: 89 †
Born: 1894
Born: November 28
Died: 1984
Died: January 14
Author
Critic
Journalist
Bay State
Justin Brooks Atkinson
Enthusiasm
Bounds
Criticism
Habit
Men
Dash
Amateur
Settled
Bound

More quotes by Brooks Atkinson

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Nobody is fully alive who cannot apply to art as much discrimination and appreciation as he applies to the work by which he earns his living.
Brooks Atkinson
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Walking companions, like heroes, are difficult to pluck out of the crowd of acquaintances. Good dispositions, ready wit, friendly conversation serve well enough by the fireside but they prove insufficient in the field. For there you need transcendentalists-nothing less you need poets, sages, humorists and natural philosophers.
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I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God's work.
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The cult of nature is a form of patronage by people who have declared their materialistic independence from nature and do not have to struggle with nature every day of their lives.
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Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.
Brooks Atkinson
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We cheerfully assume that in some mystic way love conquers all, that good outweighs evil in the just balances of the universe and at the 11th hour something gloriously triumphant will prevent the worst before it happens.
Brooks Atkinson
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In the ideal sense nothing is uninteresting there are only uninterested people.
Brooks Atkinson
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Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine.
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Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought to be.
Brooks Atkinson
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Poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
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In the 1920s dramatists attacked their subjects as if the inequities could be resolved. Some of the traditional optimism of America lurked behind most of the early plays. But not now. There is no conviction now that the problem will be solved.
Brooks Atkinson
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There is a good deal of solemn cant about the common interests of capital and labor. As matters stand, their only common interest is that of cutting each others throat.
Brooks Atkinson
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The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking.
Brooks Atkinson
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In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.
Brooks Atkinson
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Everyone in daily life carries such a heavy mixed burden on his own conscience that he is reluctant to penalize those who have been caught.
Brooks Atkinson
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Every man with an idea has at least two or three followers.
Brooks Atkinson
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There is no joy so great as that of reporting that a good play has come to town.
Brooks Atkinson
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Writing is not an end in itself but life transmuted into radiance.
Brooks Atkinson
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This nation was built by men who took risks-pioneers who were not afraid of the wilderness, businessmen who were not afraid of failure, scientists who were not afraid of the truth, thinkers who were not afraid of progress, dreamers who were not afraid of action.
Brooks Atkinson
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Although birds coexist with us on this eroded planet, they live independently of us with a self-sufficiency that is almost a rebuke. In the world of birds a symposium on the purpose of life would be inconceivable. They do not need it. We are not that self-reliant. We are the ones who have lost our way.
Brooks Atkinson