Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

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

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

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

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

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

Churchill, Charles

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

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

10.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

11.

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

West, Rebecca

12.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

16.

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

17.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

18.

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

19.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

20.

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

21.

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

22.

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

23.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

24.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

25.

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

26.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

27.

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

Costello, Elvis

28.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

29.

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

Pollock, Channing

30.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

31.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

32.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Schlegel, Friedrich

33.

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

34.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

35.

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

Wilde, Oscar

36.

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

37.

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

38.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

39.

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

Conrad, Joseph

40.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

41.

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

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.

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

44.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

45.

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

46.

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

Holtz, Lou

47.

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

Aikman, Leo

48.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

49.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

50.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar