Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Gourmont, Remy De

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

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

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Aikman, Leo

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

Conrad, Joseph

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

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

Holtz, Lou

10.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

11.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

12.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

13.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

14.

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

15.

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

Churchill, Charles

16.

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

17.

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

Christopher Hampton

18.

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

19.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

20.

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

Harold Rosenberg

21.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

22.

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

Nunn, Gregory

23.

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Briton, Crand

27.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

28.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

29.

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

Fuller, Margaret

30.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

31.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Eliot, T. S.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Paz, Octavio

36.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

37.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John

38.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

39.

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

Kundera, Milan

40.

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

41.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

43.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

44.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

45.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

46.

A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.

Shenstone, William

47.

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

Costello, Elvis

48.

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

49.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

50.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda