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Criticism

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
Criticism Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Criticism

1.
After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
Edith Wharton

2.
Blame is safer than praise.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo

3.
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

4.
I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.
Aragon, Louis

5.
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

6.
Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.
Fuller, Margaret

7.
Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.
Conrad, Joseph

8.
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

9.
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

10.
Honest criticism is hard to take, especially from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.
Jones, Franklin P.

11.
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
West, Rebecca

12.
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

13.
Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.
Hammarskjold, Dag

14.
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

15.
People who ask for your criticism want only praise.
Maugham, W. Somerset

16.
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

17.
On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.
Wilde, Oscar

18.
No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.
Tennyson, Lord Alfred

19.
Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.
Buxton, Charles

20.
The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.
Wilde, Oscar

21.
A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.
Mizner, Wilson

22.
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

23.
God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.
Hemingway, Ernest

24.
Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.
Pope, Alexander

25.
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

26.
They condemn what they do not understand.
Cicero, Marcus T.

27.
A sneer is the weapon of the weak.
Lowell, James Russell

28.
Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.
Helvetius, Claude A.

29.
A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.
Lowell, James Russell

30.
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

31.
I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.
Johnson, Samuel

32.
Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.
Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

34.
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

35.
Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.
Burroughs, William S.

36.
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

37.
The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.
Raphael, Frederic

38.
The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.
Little, Lynn M.

39.
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

40.
Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.
Mayor, Federico

41.
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

42.
A louse in the locks of literature.
Tennyson, Lord Alfred

43.
Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.
Aikman, Leo

44.
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.
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

46.
Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.
Johnson, Samuel

47.
There's a fine line between participation and mockery.
Adams, Scott

48.
All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.
Nunn, Gregory

49.
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

50.
No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.
Harold Rosenberg


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