Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

- Proverb, Chinese

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

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

Hubbard, Elbert

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

Whistler, James Mcneill

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

Shenstone, William

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

10.

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

Porchia, Antonio

11.

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

Aikman, Leo

12.

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.

13.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

14.

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

15.

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

Buxton, Charles

16.

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

Epictetus

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

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

21.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

22.

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

23.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

24.

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

25.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

26.

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

Moliere

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

Johnson, Samuel

30.

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

31.

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

Conrad, Joseph

32.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

33.

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

34.

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

Harold Rosenberg

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

39.

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

40.

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

Clurman, Harold

41.

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

Flagg, Fannie

42.

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

43.

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

Jean Sibelius

44.

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

45.

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

Churchill, Charles

46.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

47.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

48.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

49.

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

50.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.