Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Erasmus, Desiderius

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Clurman, Harold

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

Collins, Jackie

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

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

Briton, Crand

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

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

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

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

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

10.

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

11.

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

12.

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

13.

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

Holtz, Lou

14.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

15.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

16.

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

Franklin P. Jones

17.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

18.

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

19.

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

Smith, Sydney

20.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

21.

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

22.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

23.

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

24.

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

25.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

26.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

27.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

31.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

32.

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

Rostand, Jean

33.

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

Aikman, Leo

34.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

35.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

36.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

37.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

38.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

39.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

40.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

43.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

44.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Little, Lynn M.

49.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

50.

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

Paz, Octavio