Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Jones, Franklin P.

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

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

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

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

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Williams, Bern

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

10.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

11.

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

Franklin P. Jones

12.

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.

13.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

16.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

17.

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

Updike, John

18.

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

Little, Lynn M.

19.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

20.

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

21.

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

Conrad, Joseph

22.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

23.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

24.

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

Sontag, Susan

25.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

26.

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

Aikman, Leo

27.

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

Nunn, Gregory

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

33.

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

Harold Rosenberg

34.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

38.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

39.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Clurman, Harold

43.

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

44.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

45.

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

Hill, Napoleon

46.

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

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.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

49.

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

50.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline