Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Moliere

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

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

Byron, Lord

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

Benjamin, Walter

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

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

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

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

Porchia, Antonio

10.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George

11.

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

12.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

13.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

14.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

15.

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

16.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

18.

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

Elbert Hubbard

19.

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

Clurman, Harold

20.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

21.

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

22.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

23.

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

24.

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

Pollock, Channing

25.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

26.

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

Williams, Bern

27.

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

James, Clive

28.

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

Kundera, Milan

29.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

30.

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.

31.

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

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.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Aikman, Leo

37.

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

38.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

39.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

40.

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

Mizner, Wilson

41.

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory

42.

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

Hill, Napoleon

43.

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

Hugo, Victor

44.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Cocteau, Jean

45.

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

46.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

47.

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Rostand, Jean