Motivational Quotes

Criticism

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

- Churchill, Winston

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

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

Steinbeck, John

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.

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

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

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

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

Guinon, Albert

10.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

11.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

12.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

13.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

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

15.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

16.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

17.

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

Harold Rosenberg

18.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

19.

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

20.

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

Mizner, Wilson

21.

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

22.

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

23.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

24.

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

25.

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

26.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

27.

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

28.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

29.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

30.

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

Churchill, Charles

31.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

32.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

33.

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

James, Clive

34.

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

Pollock, Channing

35.

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

36.

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

Native American Proverb

37.

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

Rostand, Jean

38.

Let me walk three weeks in the footsteps of my enemy, carry the same burden, have the same trials as he, before I say one word to criticize.

39.

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

Benjamin, Walter

40.

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

41.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

42.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

43.

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

Conrad, Joseph

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney

46.

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

Elbert Hubbard

47.

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

48.

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

Kundera, Milan

49.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

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.