Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- James, Clive

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Murdoch, Iris

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Buxton, Charles

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Eliot, T. S.

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

Nunn, Gregory

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

Little, Lynn M.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

11.

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

12.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

13.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Cocteau, Jean

14.

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

15.

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

Aikman, Leo

16.

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

17.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

18.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

19.

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

20.

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

21.

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

Benjamin, Walter

22.

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

23.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

24.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

25.

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

26.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

27.

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

James, Clive

28.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

29.

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

Smith, Sydney

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Johnson, Samuel

33.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

34.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

35.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

40.

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

41.

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

Guinon, Albert

42.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

43.

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

Epictetus

44.

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

45.

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

46.

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

48.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

49.

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

Porchia, Antonio

50.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.