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

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

Conrad, Joseph

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.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

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

Harold Rosenberg

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Churchill, Charles

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

Nunn, Gregory

10.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

11.

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

12.

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

13.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

14.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Cocteau, Jean

18.

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

Moliere

19.

A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.

Shenstone, William

20.

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

Bible

21.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

22.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

23.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

24.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Johnson, Samuel

28.

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

29.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

30.

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

31.

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

Hugo, Victor

32.

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

33.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

34.

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

35.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

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.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Benjamin, Walter

39.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

40.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

41.

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

42.

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

Kundera, Milan

43.

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

44.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

45.

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

Raphael, Frederic

46.

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

Sontag, Susan

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Pollock, Channing

50.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset