Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Pope, Alexander

Best Quotes about Criticism

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

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

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

Smith, Sydney

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

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

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

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

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

13.

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

Dale Carnegie

14.

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

Johnson, Samuel

15.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Aragon, Louis

16.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

17.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

18.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

19.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

20.

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

21.

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

James, Henry

22.

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

Cocteau, Jean

23.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

24.

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

Porchia, Antonio

25.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

26.

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

27.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

28.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

29.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

30.

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

31.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

32.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

33.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

34.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

35.

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

39.

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

40.

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

Miller, Henry

41.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

42.

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

43.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

44.

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

45.

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

Epictetus

46.

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

47.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

48.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

49.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

50.

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