Programs · Episode

Great Quotations: George Bernard Shaw

Aired: Friday, January 19, 2018 @ 9:00 am
Hosted by Miles Hoffman

George Bernard Shaw began his career as a music critic, and in September of 1890 he wrote these words:

“People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my [reviews] as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that a criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading.

It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic…When people do less than their best, and do that at once badly and self-complacently, I hate them, loathe them, detest them, long to tear them limb from limb… In the same way, really fine artists inspire me with the warmest personal regard…[and] when my critical mood is at its height, personal feeling is not the word: it is passion: the passion for artistic perfection—for the noblest beauty of sound, sight, and action—that rages in me.” The words of George Bernard Shaw.

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