Motivational Quotes

Criticism

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn't make your house look any better.

- Holtz, Lou

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Wilde, Oscar

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

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

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

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Moliere

14.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

15.

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

16.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

17.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

18.

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

Hugo, Victor

19.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

20.

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

Kundera, Milan

21.

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.

22.

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

Native American Proverb

23.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

28.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Aikman, Leo

33.

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

Johnson, Samuel

34.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

35.

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

36.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

37.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

38.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

39.

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

40.

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Hubbard, Elbert

41.

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

Shenstone, William

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Epictetus

48.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

49.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.