Motivational Quotes

Criticism

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

- Beecher, Henry Ward

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Raphael, Frederic

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth

10.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

11.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

12.

No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

14.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

15.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

16.

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

Burns, Robert

17.

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

Lowell, James Russell

18.

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella

19.

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

20.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

21.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

22.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

23.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John

24.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

25.

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.

26.

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

Pollock, Channing

27.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Kurt Vonnegut

28.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

29.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

30.

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

31.

You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

Whistler, James Mcneill

32.

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

Richard Pryor

33.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

35.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

36.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

37.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Paz, Octavio

38.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

39.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

40.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Cocteau, Jean

41.

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

42.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

43.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

45.

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

46.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

47.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

48.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

49.

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

50.

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

Elbert Hubbard