Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

- Lawrence, D. H.

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Pollock, Channing

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Smith, Sydney

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

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

Epictetus

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

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella

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

Proverb, Chinese

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

10.

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

11.

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

Clurman, Harold

12.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

13.

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

Elbert Hubbard

14.

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

15.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

16.

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

17.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

18.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

19.

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

20.

Let me walk three weeks in the footsteps of my enemy, carry the same burden, have the same trials as he, before I say one word to criticize.

21.

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

Kundera, Milan

22.

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

23.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

24.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

25.

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

26.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

27.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Sontag, Susan

33.

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

34.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

35.

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

38.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

39.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

40.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

41.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Shenstone, William

45.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

46.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

47.

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

Pope, Alexander

48.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

49.

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

Little, Lynn M.

50.

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