A Quote by Dorothy Parker

There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind...There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.
There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it.
It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.
Happiness is impossible, and even inconceivable, to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure, or fear. To be happy, you must be reasonable, or you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world and what things in it can really serve you. To be happy, you must be wise.
The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.
Every day you must arise and say to your heart, I have suffered enough and now I must live because the light of the sun must not be wasted, it must not be lost without an eye to appreciate it.
To be a gourmet you must start early, as you must begin riding early to be a good horseman. You must live in France, your father must have been a gourmet. Nothing in life must interest you but your stomach.
If you wish to begin life at forty, you must settle two large personal questions first of all. You must find work and play that call for no more energy than you can afford to spend on them. Then you must train your mind, eye and hand to the point of working and playing with ease, grace and precision.
You must have a twinkle in your eye, a naughtiness - and the audience must realize your mind is working faster than your words.
Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.
You must learn to meditate and stop your thoughts. You must overcome all egotism and selfishness by serving others. You must cleanse your mind so that enlightenment will find a happy place to reside there.
You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image, - mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse: you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain, - you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost: you must do it so that at the end of your day's work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the notion that there is nothing, - nothing left in you.
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for... Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom.
The immediate source of a mind... must be a mind which existed before the conception took place; the mind must have a continuity from a previous mind. This we hold to prove the existence of a past life.
You must read, you must persevere, you must sit up nights, you must inquire, and exert the utmost power of your mind. If one way does not lead to the desired meaning, take another; if obstacles arise, then still another; until, if your strength holds out, you will find that clear which at first looked dark.
The mere stuffing of the mind with a knowledge of facts is not education. The mind must not only possess a knowledge of the truth, but the soul must revere it, cherish it, love it as a priceless gem; and this human life must be guided and shaped by it in order to fulfill its destiny.
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