Motivational Quotes

Criticism

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

- Adams, Scott

Best Quotes about Criticism

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Eliot, T. S.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

10.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Johnson, Samuel

11.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

13.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

14.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

15.

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

16.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

17.

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

18.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

19.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

20.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

21.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

22.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George

23.

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

Williams, Bern

24.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

25.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

26.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

28.

To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Elbert Hubbard

29.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

30.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

31.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

32.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

33.

Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.

Pollock, Channing

34.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

35.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

36.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

38.

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

39.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

40.

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

41.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

42.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

43.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

44.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

45.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

46.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

47.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

48.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

49.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

50.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair