Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Hammarskjold, Dag

Best Quotes about Criticism

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

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

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

Harold Rosenberg

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

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

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

10.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

11.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Beecher, Henry Ward

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Bible

15.

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

16.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

17.

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

Costello, Elvis

18.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

19.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

20.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

21.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

22.

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

23.

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

Rayburn, Sam

24.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

29.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

30.

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

31.

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

Pollock, Channing

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

35.

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

36.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

37.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

38.

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

Kael, Pauline

39.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

40.

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

Moliere

41.

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

France, Anatole

42.

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

Turner, Ted

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

46.

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

47.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

48.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.