Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Elbert Hubbard

Best Quotes about Criticism

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

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

Williams, Bern

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

Benjamin, Walter

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

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

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

Nunn, Gregory

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.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

11.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

12.

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

13.

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

James, Clive

14.

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

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.

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

17.

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

18.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

19.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

20.

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

21.

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

Mizner, Wilson

22.

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

Fuller, Margaret

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

26.

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

27.

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Buxton, Charles

28.

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

29.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

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.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

32.

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.

33.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

34.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

35.

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

Aikman, Leo

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

41.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

42.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

43.

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

Clurman, Harold

44.

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

Steinbeck, John

45.

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

Hill, Napoleon

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Wilde, Oscar

50.

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