Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Nunn, Gregory

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

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

Honest criticism is hard to take, especially from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

Jones, Franklin P.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

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.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

10.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Turner, Ted

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

15.

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

Churchill, Charles

16.

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

James, Clive

17.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

18.

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

West, Rebecca

19.

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

Kundera, Milan

20.

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

Kael, Pauline

21.

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

Mascotte, John P.

22.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

23.

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

Hugo, Victor

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Paz, Octavio

27.

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

Sontag, Susan

28.

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

France, Anatole

29.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

30.

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

31.

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

Johnson, Samuel

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.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Frye, Northrop

35.

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

Raphael, Frederic

36.

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

Little, Lynn M.

37.

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

Hill, Napoleon

38.

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

39.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

40.

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

Rayburn, Sam

41.

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

42.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

43.

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

44.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

45.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

46.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

47.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

48.

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

49.

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

50.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar