Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Gourmont, Remy De

Best Quotes about Criticism

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert

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

Pope, Alexander

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

Jean Sibelius

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

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

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

Hill, Napoleon

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

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

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

10.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

11.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

12.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Turner, Ted

17.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

18.

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

19.

In reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Fielding, Henry

20.

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

Porchia, Antonio

21.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

22.

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

23.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

24.

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

25.

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

26.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

27.

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

Little, Lynn M.

28.

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

Johnson, Samuel

29.

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

30.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

31.

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

Bible

32.

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

33.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

34.

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

35.

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

Miller, Henry

36.

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

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

39.

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

40.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

41.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

42.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

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

Fuller, Margaret

44.

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

Mascotte, John P.

45.

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

46.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

47.

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

48.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

49.

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

Steinbeck, John

50.

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

Churchill, Charles