Manhattan High Schools BESARS Program

 

 

 100+ CRITICAL LENSES

 

1.      Samuel Johnson: “Literature is a kind of intellectual light which, like the light of the sun, may sometimes enable us to see what we do not like.”

 

2.   Henry David Thoreau: “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.”

 

3.  William E. Henley: “ I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”

 

4.      John Stuart Mill: “The great creative individual...is capable of more wisdom and virtue than collective man ever can be.”

 

5.      Norman Cousins: “Death is not the greatest loss in life.  The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”

 

6.   Ernest Hemingway: “Courage is grace under pressure.”

 

7.      George Bernard Shaw: “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire.  The other is to get it.”

 

8.      Georgia O’Keeffe: “Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant.  It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.”

 

9.      Aristophanes: “Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life.”

 

10.  Blaise Pascal: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.”

 

11.  Lost Star of the Maricopa Tribe: “Everyone who is prosperous or successful must have dreamed of something.  It is not because one has been a good worker that one is successful, but because one has dreamed.”

 

12. Vince Lombardi: “Winning is not the most important thing; it’s everything.”

 

13.    Booker T. Washington: “A sure way for one to lift oneself up is by helping to lift someone else.”

 

14.    Hannibal: “We will either find a way or make one.”

 

15.    Theodore Roosevelt: “Do what you can with what you have.”

 

16.    Eleanor Roosevelt: “When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.”

 

17.    Arthur Guiterman: “True success is that which makes  
                              Building stones of old mistakes.”

 

18.    Addison: “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”

 

19.    Bulwer-Lytton: “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

 

20.    Cervantes: “The pen is the tongue of the mind.”

 

21.    Chesterfield: “You must look into people as well as at them.”

 

22.    Thomas Paine: “The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”

 

23.    Bacon: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested.”

 

24.    R. Choate: “A book is the only immortality.”

 

25.    Machiavelli: “Men in general judge more from appearance than reality. All men have eyes but few have the gift of penetration.”

 

26.    Alfrieri: “Often the test of courage becomes rather to live than to die.”

 

27.    Carl Sandburg: “Nothing happens unless first a dream.”

 

28.    Jiminy Cricket: “When your heart is in your dream no request is too extreme.”

 

29.    Woodrow Wilson: “We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers.”

 

30.    (unknown) “Like dreams, small creeks grow into mighty rivers.”

 

31.    John Barrymore: “A man is not old until until regrets take the place of dreams.”

 

32.    André Maurois: “In literature as in love we are astonished at what is chosen by others.”

 

33.    Guy de Maupassant: “Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man…a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.”

 

34.    Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”

 

35.    George Bernard Shaw:  “Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.”

 

36.    Epictetus: “Difficulties are things that show what men are.”

 

37.    Socrates: “No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.”

 

38.    Ernest Hemingway: “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

 

39.    Mark Twain: “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”

 

40.    Titus Maccius Plautus: “Nothing is there more friendly to a man than a friend in need.”

 

41.    Joseph Conrad: “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”

 

42.    Shakespeare: “Mine honour is my life; both grown in one;

      Take honour from me, and my life is done.”

 

43.    George Moore: “The difficulty in life is the choice…the wrong way always seems the more reasonable.”

 

44.    Robert Burns: “Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.”

 

45.    Lord Macaulay: “The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.”

 

46.    Molière: “If everyone were clothed in integrity, if every heart were just, …the other virtues would be well-nigh useless.”

 

47.    Kermit the Frog: “It’s not easy being green.”

 

48.    Lillian Hellman: “For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.”

 

49.    Jorge Luis Borges: “A man gradually identifies himself with the form of his fate; a man is, in the long run, his own circumstances.”

 

50.    Anaïs Nin: “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”

 

51.    Emily Dickinson: “There is no frigate like a book/To take us to lands far away.”

 

52.    John Gray: “A moment in time may make us unhappy forever.”

 

53.    Alexander Pope: “To err is human, to forgive is divine.”

 

54.    Robert Frost: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by.

                               And that has made all the difference.”

 

55.    Anne Frank: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

 

56.    Shakespeare: “Cowards die many times before their deaths.”

 

57.    Cervantes: “Can we ever have too much of a good thing?”

 

58.    William Jennings Bryan: “Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice.”

 

59.    Peter Drucker: “There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.”

 

60.    Theodore Roosevelt: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

 

61.    Wordsworth:  Poetry is… “the imaginative expression of strong feeling.”  (The same can be said of all literature.)

 

62.     John Greenleaf Whittier:  “For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”

 

63.    Horace Walpole:  “This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who  feel.”

 

64.    Logan Pearsall Smith:  “The great art of writing is the art of making people real to

       themselves with words…”

 

65.    Willa Cather:  “Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an

       intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the

       writer’s own, individual, unique…”

 

66.    Picasso:  “Art is a lie which makes us realize truth…”

 

67.  Alfred North Whitehead:  “There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths.”

 

68.  Plato:  “The beginning is the most important part of the work…”

 

69.  Robert Frost:  “Ends and beginnings—there are no such things.  There are only 

       middles.”

 

70.  Ecclesisastes:  “Better is the end of a thing than the beginning.”

 

71.  Julius Caesar:  “Men willingly believe what they wish.”

 

72.   Margaret Hungerford:  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

 

73.  George Moore:  “Art is not Nature, Art is Nature digested…”

 

74.   Aesop:  Appearances are deceptive…”

 

75.   Walter Pater:  “Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of

       the age and the people in which it was produced.”

 

76.   Ezra Pound:  “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the

       utmost possible degree.”

 

77.   Ezra Pound:  “Literature is news that stays news.”

 

78.  Chaucer:  “Love is blind.”

 

79.  Virgil:  “Love conquers all.”

 

80.  Shakespeare:  “They do not love that do not show their love.”

 

81.  Mahatma Gandhi:  “Love always gives.  Love ever suffers, never resents, never

       revenges itself.”

 

82.    La Rochefoucauld:  “If we judge of love by most of its results, it resembles hatred

       more than friendship.”

 

83.  Frederick Langbridge:  “Two men look out through the same bars: One sees the mud,

      and one the stars.”

 

84.  Seneca:  “It is not the man who has little, but he who desires more, that is poor.”

 

85.  Machiavelli:  “For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as

       though they were realities and are often more influenced by the things that seem than

       by  those that are.”

 

86.  from the Tao (Chinese):  “When evil recognizes itself, it destroys itself.”

 

87.    Bible I, Timothy 6:10:  “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

 

88.    Aeschylus (in Agamemnon):  “Wisdom comes only through suffering.”

 

89.    Ryszard Kapuscinski:  “ Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.”

 

90.    Sophocles (in Oedipus Rex): “The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.”

 

91.    Ralph Waldo Emerson:  “People see only what they are prepared to see.”

 

92.  Flora Whittemore:  “The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.”

 

93.   Will Smith:  “Money and success don’t change people; they merely amplify what is

        already there.”

 

94.   Donald Trump:  “In the end, you’re measured not by how much you undertake but by

       what you finally accomplish.”

 

95.   Henry J. Kaiser:  “Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.”

 

96.  Harry Belafonte:  “You can cage the singer but not the song.”  

 

97.   Ralph Waldo Emerson:  “Books are for nothing but to inspire.”

 

98.   Walt Disney:  “Believe in the future, the world is getting better, there is still plenty of

       opportunity.”

 

99.   Peter Drucker:  “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” 

 

100.    Andy Warhol:  “They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change

         them yourself.”

 

101.  Emily Dickinson:   “The past is not a package one can lay away.”

 

102.  Cicero:  “It is pleasant to recall past trouble.”

 

103.    Rollo May:  “Memory is not just the imprint of the past upon us; it is the keeper of

         what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears.”

 

104.  Carlos Fuentes:  "It isn't the past that dies with each of us. The future dies as well."

105. 
Lao-Tzu:  “He who knows others is clever; he who knows himself is enlightened.”

 

106.  Albert Camus:  “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an

         invincible summer.”

107. Confucius: "Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall."

108. Booker T. Washington: "I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position 
        that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed."

109.  Eleanor Roosevelt:  “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

 


 

CRITICAL LENSES ABOUT LITERATURE
(including those from past Regents exams)

William Faulkner: "The best literature is about the old universal truths, such as love, honor, pride, compassion, and sacrifice." (adapted)

Joseph Conrad: "The task of a writer is ‘by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.’"

E. M. Forster: "Fiction is truer than history, for it is only in fiction [and drama] that we can understand the hidden life of the characters…"

"In literature, evil often triumphs but never conquers." 6/99

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: "Good literature substitutes for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through." (adapted) 8/99

Anne Lamott: "When writers write from a place of insight and real caring about the truth, they have the ability to throw the lights on for the reader." (adapted) 1/00

Logan Pearsall Smith: "It is not what an author says, but what he or she whispers, that is important." (adapted) 6/00

Thomas Hardy: "A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling; it must have something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experience of every average man and woman." 8/00

John Steinbeck: "It is the responsibility of the writer to expose our many grievous faults and failures and to hold up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams, for the purpose of improvement." (adapted) 1/01

All conflict in literature is, in its simplest form, a struggle between good and evil." 6/01

Peter Brodie: "What lasts is what is written. We look to literature to find the essence of an age." (adapted) 8/01

Richard Wright: "All literature is protest. You can’t name a single literary work that isn’t protest." (adapted) 1/02

Duff Brenna:  “All literature shows us the power of emotion. It is emotion, not reason, that motivates characters in literature.”  (paraphrased from an interview)  1/03

 

William Saroyan:  “Good people … are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure.”  6/03

 

Oliver Wendell Holmes:  “We do not read novels* for improvement or instruction.”

(*For the purpose of writing your critical essay, you may interpret the word novels to include plays, short stories, poems, biographies, and books of true experience.)  8/03

 

 

 

 

Compiled by: Fran Lacas and Devorah Tedeschi (Office of the Superintendent of Manhattan High Schools).

                  

 

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