Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Hugo, Victor

Best Quotes about Criticism

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

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

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

Byron, Lord

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

Sontag, Susan

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

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

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

10.

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

11.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Cioran, E. M.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Aikman, Leo

16.

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

17.

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

Hampton, Christopher

18.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

19.

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

Turner, Ted

20.

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

Raphael, Frederic

21.

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

22.

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert

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.

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

25.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

26.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

29.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

30.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

31.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

32.

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

Richard Pryor

33.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

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.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

36.

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

37.

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney

38.

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

39.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

40.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

41.

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

Briton, Crand

42.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

43.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

44.

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

Ziglar, Zig

45.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

46.

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

Christopher Hampton

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

49.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

50.

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

Lowell, James Russell