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

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

Kundera, Milan

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Williams, Bern

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

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

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

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

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

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

10.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

11.

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

Steinbeck, John

12.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

13.

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

14.

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

15.

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

Kundera, Milan

16.

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

17.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

18.

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

19.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

20.

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

21.

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

Hill, Napoleon

22.

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

Ziglar, Zig

23.

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

24.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

25.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

28.

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

29.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

30.

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

31.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Aragon, Louis

32.

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

33.

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

Dale Carnegie

34.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

35.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

41.

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

42.

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

Costello, Elvis

43.

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

Little, Lynn M.

44.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

45.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

46.

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

Shenstone, William

47.

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

Cocteau, Jean

48.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

49.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

50.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De