Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Flagg, Fannie

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

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

Kundera, Milan

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

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

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

11.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

12.

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

Franklin P. Jones

13.

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

Cocteau, Jean

14.

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

Turner, Ted

15.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

16.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt

17.

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

18.

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

19.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

21.

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.

22.

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

Kael, Pauline

23.

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

Murdoch, Iris

24.

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

Burns, Robert

25.

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

Costello, Elvis

26.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

27.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

28.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

29.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

30.

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

31.

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

Benjamin, Walter

32.

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

Steinbeck, John

33.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

34.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

35.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Buxton, Charles

37.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

38.

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

39.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

40.

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

Bible

41.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

42.

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.

43.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

44.

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

Johnson, Samuel

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.