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

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Turner, Ted

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

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

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

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

Conrad, Joseph

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

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

10.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

11.

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.

12.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

13.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

14.

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

15.

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

Kundera, Milan

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Proverb, Chinese

19.

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

Hampton, Christopher

20.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

21.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

22.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

24.

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

25.

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

Steinbeck, John

26.

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.

27.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

28.

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

29.

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

Smith, Sydney

30.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

31.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

32.

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

James, Clive

33.

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

Rayburn, Sam

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

38.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

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

Harold Rosenberg

40.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

41.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

42.

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

Cocteau, Jean

43.

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

Paz, Octavio

44.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

45.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

46.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

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

48.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

49.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

50.

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

Nunn, Gregory