Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Best Quotes about 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

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

James, Clive

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

Benjamin, Walter

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

Williams, Bern

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Hugo, Victor

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

15.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John

16.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

17.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

18.

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

Byron, Lord

19.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

20.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

21.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

22.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

24.

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

25.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

26.

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

27.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

28.

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

Ziglar, Zig

29.

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

Dale Carnegie

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

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

Christopher Hampton

33.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Churchill, Charles

37.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

38.

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

39.

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

40.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

41.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

42.

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

43.

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

Guinon, Albert

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Smith, Sydney

48.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

49.

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

Proverb, Chinese

50.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.