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

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

Pollock, Channing

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

Fuller, Margaret

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

Porchia, Antonio

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

Holtz, Lou

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

10.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

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

Little, Lynn M.

15.

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

Costello, Elvis

16.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

17.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

Churchill, Charles

25.

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

Miller, Henry

26.

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

Collins, Jackie

27.

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

28.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

29.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

31.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Carlyle, Thomas

35.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

36.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

37.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

38.

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

Benjamin, Walter

39.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

40.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

41.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

42.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

43.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

45.

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

Burns, Robert

46.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

47.

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

48.

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.

Aikman, Leo

49.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

50.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel