Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

- Benjamin, Walter

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

Hill, Napoleon

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

10.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

11.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

12.

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

Ziglar, Zig

13.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

14.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

16.

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

Churchill, Charles

17.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

18.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

19.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

20.

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

Cocteau, Jean

21.

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Hemingway, Ernest

22.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

23.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

24.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La

25.

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

Updike, John

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

30.

The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.

Little, Lynn M.

31.

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

32.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

33.

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert

34.

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

35.

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

36.

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory

37.

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn't make your house look any better.

Holtz, Lou

38.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

39.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

40.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

41.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

42.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

44.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

45.

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

47.

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

Rostand, Jean

48.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

49.

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

50.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie