Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

Ziglar, Zig

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

Little, Lynn M.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Harold Rosenberg

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

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

11.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

12.

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

James, Clive

13.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

14.

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

15.

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

16.

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

17.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

18.

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

19.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

20.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

21.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

22.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

23.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

24.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

25.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

26.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

27.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

28.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

29.

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

Rostand, Jean

30.

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

Holtz, Lou

31.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Aragon, Louis

32.

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb

33.

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

34.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

35.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

36.

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

37.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Nunn, Gregory

41.

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

France, Anatole

42.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Steinbeck, John

45.

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.

46.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

47.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

48.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

49.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

50.

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