Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

- Helvetius, Claude A.

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

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

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

Mascotte, John P.

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

Paz, Octavio

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

Native American Proverb

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

Ziglar, Zig

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

14.

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.

15.

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

Hampton, Christopher

16.

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

Churchill, Charles

17.

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

18.

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

Pope, Alexander

19.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

20.

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

21.

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

Williams, Bern

22.

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

Johnson, Samuel

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Shenstone, William

29.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

30.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Benjamin, Walter

31.

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

Bible

32.

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

33.

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

Burns, Robert

34.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Hugo, Victor

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Harold Rosenberg

41.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

42.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

43.

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

44.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

45.

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

Moliere

46.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Kurt Vonnegut

47.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

48.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

49.

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

50.

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

Wilde, Oscar