Motivational Quotes

Criticism

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

- Richard Pryor

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Harold Rosenberg

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

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

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

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Jones, Franklin P.

10.

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

11.

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

Proverb, Chinese

12.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

13.

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

14.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

15.

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

Clurman, Harold

16.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

17.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

18.

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

Hugo, Victor

19.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Burns, Robert

23.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

24.

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.

25.

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

Benjamin, Walter

26.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

27.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

28.

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

29.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

30.

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

Smith, Sydney

31.

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

32.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

33.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

34.

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

Native American Proverb

35.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Beecher, Henry Ward

36.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

40.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

41.

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

42.

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

43.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

44.

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

45.

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

Kael, Pauline

46.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

47.

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

48.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

49.

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

50.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar