Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

In reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Fielding, Henry

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

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

Ziglar, Zig

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

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

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.

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.

10.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Schlegel, Friedrich

11.

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

12.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

13.

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

14.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

15.

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

Franklin P. Jones

16.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Fuller, Margaret

19.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

20.

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

Briton, Crand

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

26.

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

Buxton, Charles

27.

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.

28.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

29.

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

30.

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

Wilde, Oscar

31.

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

Steinbeck, John

32.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

33.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

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.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

36.

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.

37.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

38.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

39.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

46.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

47.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

48.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Frye, Northrop

49.

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

Guinon, Albert

50.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.