Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

- Picasso, Pablo

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Epictetus

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

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

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

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

Moliere

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

Hugo, Victor

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

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

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

10.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

11.

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

12.

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

Cioran, E. M.

13.

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.

14.

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

Murdoch, Iris

15.

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

Aikman, Leo

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Elbert Hubbard

19.

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

20.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

21.

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

22.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

23.

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

Churchill, Charles

24.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

25.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

26.

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

Native American Proverb

27.

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

Cocteau, Jean

28.

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

Pollock, Channing

29.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

30.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

31.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

32.

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

James, Clive

33.

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

Hill, Napoleon

34.

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

Franklin P. Jones

35.

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

36.

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

37.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

38.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

39.

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

40.

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

Rostand, Jean

41.

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

42.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

44.

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

Porchia, Antonio

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

48.

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

49.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

50.

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