Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

- Kundera, Milan

Best Quotes about 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

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

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

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

10.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

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

Clurman, Harold

12.

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

13.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

14.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Cioran, E. M.

15.

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

16.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

17.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

18.

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

19.

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

Pope, Alexander

20.

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

21.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

22.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

23.

In reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Fielding, Henry

24.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

25.

Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.

Mascotte, John P.

26.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

27.

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

Churchill, Charles

28.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

30.

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

Little, Lynn M.

31.

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

32.

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

Proverb, Chinese

33.

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

34.

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

Smith, Sydney

35.

No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.

Carlyle, Thomas

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.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

38.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

39.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

40.

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

Sontag, Susan

41.

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

42.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

43.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

44.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

45.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La

46.

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

47.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

48.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

49.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

50.

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

Christopher Hampton