Motivational Quotes

Criticism

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

- Carlyle, Thomas

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Mizner, Wilson

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

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

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

Guinon, Albert

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

Hampton, Christopher

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

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

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

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

10.

Carlyle, Thomas

11.

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

12.

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

13.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

14.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

15.

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.

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Epictetus

18.

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

19.

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

20.

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

Bible

21.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

22.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

23.

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

24.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

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.

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

Cocteau, Jean

27.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

28.

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.

29.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

30.

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.

31.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

33.

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

34.

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

Collins, Jackie

35.

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

Burns, Robert

36.

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

37.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

38.

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.

39.

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

Steinbeck, John

40.

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

Buxton, Charles

41.

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Miller, Henry

42.

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

43.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

44.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

45.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

46.

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

Henry Fielding

47.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

Rostand, Jean

49.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

50.

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

Mcclung, Nellie