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

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

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

Turner, Ted

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem 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

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

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

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

10.

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

11.

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

15.

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

Steinbeck, John

16.

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

17.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

18.

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

Rayburn, Sam

19.

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

Harold Rosenberg

20.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

21.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

22.

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.

23.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

24.

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

Aikman, Leo

25.

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

James, Henry

26.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

27.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

28.

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

Ziglar, Zig

29.

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

30.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

33.

Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.

Pollock, Channing

34.

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

Porchia, Antonio

35.

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

Mascotte, John P.

36.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

37.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

38.

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

Lowell, James Russell

39.

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.

40.

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb

41.

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

42.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

43.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

44.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

45.

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

Kundera, Milan

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Raphael, Frederic

49.

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

Little, Lynn M.

50.

Let me walk three weeks in the footsteps of my enemy, carry the same burden, have the same trials as he, before I say one word to criticize.