Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

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

Miller, Henry

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

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

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

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

Johnson, Samuel

11.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Franklin P. Jones

16.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

17.

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

18.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

19.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

20.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

21.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

22.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

23.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

25.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

26.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

27.

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

28.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

29.

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

Moliere

30.

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

31.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

32.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

33.

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

Proverb, Chinese

34.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

35.

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

Fuller, Margaret

36.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

37.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

38.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

39.

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

40.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

41.

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

Smith, Sydney

42.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

43.

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.

44.

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

Little, Lynn M.

45.

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

46.

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

Mascotte, John P.

47.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

48.

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

49.

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

Briton, Crand

50.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar