Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Johnson, Samuel

Best Quotes about Criticism

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

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

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

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

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

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

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

10.

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

11.

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

Pollock, Channing

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

16.

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

17.

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

18.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

20.

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

21.

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

22.

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

23.

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

24.

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

Buxton, Charles

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Bible

29.

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

Raphael, Frederic

30.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

31.

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

Epictetus

32.

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

Little, Lynn M.

33.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

34.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

35.

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

Ziglar, Zig

36.

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

37.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

38.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

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

Richard Pryor

40.

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

41.

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

Nunn, Gregory

42.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

43.

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

Kundera, Milan

44.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

45.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

46.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

47.

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

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.

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

50.

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

Mcclung, Nellie