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

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

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

Hoffman, Dustin

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

Briton, Crand

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

Kundera, Milan

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

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

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

Harold Rosenberg

10.

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

11.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

12.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

13.

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

Turner, Ted

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

17.

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

18.

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

Benjamin, Walter

19.

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

Wilde, Oscar

20.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

21.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

22.

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

23.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

25.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

26.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

27.

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

James, Henry

28.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

29.

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

Hugo, Victor

30.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

31.

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

35.

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

Porchia, Antonio

36.

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

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.

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

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

41.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

42.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

43.

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

Pope, Alexander

44.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

45.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

46.

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

Churchill, Charles

47.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

48.

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

49.

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

Hampton, Christopher

50.

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

Native American Proverb