Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Porchia, Antonio

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

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

Hubbard, Elbert

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

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

Rostand, Jean

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

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

10.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

11.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

12.

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

Hoffman, Dustin

13.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

14.

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

15.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

16.

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

17.

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

Steinbeck, John

18.

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

Moliere

19.

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

Nunn, Gregory

20.

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

21.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

22.

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.

23.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

24.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

25.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

26.

A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.

Shenstone, William

27.

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

Murdoch, Iris

28.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

29.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Cioran, E. M.

31.

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

32.

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

35.

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

Bible

36.

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

Clurman, Harold

37.

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.

38.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

39.

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

Native American Proverb

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Churchill, Charles

43.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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