Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Clurman, Harold

Best Quotes about Criticism

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Johnson, Samuel

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

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

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Tynan, Kenneth

10.

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

11.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

12.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

13.

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

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

Pollock, Channing

15.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

Hoffman, Dustin

17.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

18.

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

Kundera, Milan

19.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

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.

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

25.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George

26.

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

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

32.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

33.

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

Costello, Elvis

34.

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

Little, Lynn M.

35.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

36.

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

Clurman, Harold

37.

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

38.

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

39.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

40.

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

Fuller, Margaret

41.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

42.

Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.

Mascotte, John P.

43.

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

44.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

45.

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

46.

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

Guinon, Albert

47.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

48.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

49.

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

Benjamin, Walter

50.

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

Harold Rosenberg