Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Paz, Octavio

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

Conrad, Joseph

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

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Mizner, Wilson

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

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Kurt Vonnegut

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

Jones, Franklin P.

10.

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

11.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

12.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

13.

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

James, Clive

14.

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

15.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

16.

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

17.

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

Williams, Bern

18.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

19.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

20.

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory

21.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

Native American Proverb

25.

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

26.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Cocteau, Jean

30.

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

Hugo, Victor

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

Mascotte, John P.

33.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

38.

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

39.

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

40.

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

41.

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

Briton, Crand

42.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

45.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

46.

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

Miller, Henry

47.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

48.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

49.

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.

50.

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.