Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Mascotte, John P.

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

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

Burns, Robert

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

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

Smith, Sydney

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

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.

10.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

11.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

12.

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

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.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

15.

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

16.

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

Kundera, Milan

17.

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Miller, Henry

18.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

19.

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

20.

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

Moliere

21.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

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.

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

Cioran, E. M.

24.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

25.

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.

26.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

27.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

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.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

30.

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

Aikman, Leo

31.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

35.

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

Benjamin, Walter

36.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

40.

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

43.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Frye, Northrop

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

46.

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

Pope, Alexander

47.

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

Hill, Napoleon

48.

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

49.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

50.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth