Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

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

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

Williams, Bern

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Ziglar, Zig

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

Whistler, James Mcneill

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

10.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Holtz, Lou

15.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

16.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

17.

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

Kundera, Milan

18.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

19.

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

20.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

26.

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

28.

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

Johnson, Samuel

29.

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

Little, Lynn M.

30.

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

Cocteau, Jean

31.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

38.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

39.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

40.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

41.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

42.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

43.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

44.

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

Costello, Elvis

45.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

46.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

47.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

48.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

49.

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

50.

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

Paz, Octavio