Motivational Quotes

Criticism

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

- La Bruyere, Jean De

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

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

Sontag, Susan

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

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

Raphael, Frederic

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

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

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

10.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

11.

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

Benjamin, Walter

12.

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

Kundera, Milan

13.

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

14.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

15.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

16.

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

17.

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

Conrad, Joseph

18.

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

Burns, Robert

19.

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

Kael, Pauline

20.

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

Clurman, Harold

21.

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

22.

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

23.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

24.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

25.

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

Proverb, Chinese

26.

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

27.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

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.

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

Pollock, Channing

30.

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

31.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

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

Epictetus

33.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

34.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

35.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

36.

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

37.

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

Kundera, Milan

38.

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

39.

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

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

41.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

42.

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

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.

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

45.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

46.

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

France, Anatole

47.

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

48.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

49.

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

50.

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

Shenstone, William