Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

- Mayor, Federico

Best Quotes about Criticism

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

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

Smith, Sydney

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

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

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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

10.

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

11.

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

Churchill, Charles

12.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John

13.

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

14.

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

Pope, Alexander

15.

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

Porchia, Antonio

16.

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

Benjamin, Walter

17.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

18.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

Elbert Hubbard

22.

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

Raphael, Frederic

23.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

24.

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

25.

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

Little, Lynn M.

26.

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

West, Rebecca

27.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

28.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

29.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

30.

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

Epictetus

31.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

32.

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

33.

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

Buxton, Charles

34.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

35.

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

Clurman, Harold

36.

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

Henry Fielding

37.

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

38.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

James, Clive

46.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

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

49.

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

Byron, Lord

50.

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.