Motivational Quotes

Criticism

A louse in the locks of literature.

- Tennyson, Lord Alfred

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Ziglar, Zig

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

Moliere

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Benjamin Disraeli

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

10.

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

Dale Carnegie

11.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Kurt Vonnegut

12.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

13.

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

14.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

15.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

16.

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

17.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Miller, Henry

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

24.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

25.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

26.

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

27.

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

28.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

29.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

41.

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

42.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

43.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

44.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

45.

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

46.

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

Updike, John

47.

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

48.

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

Wilde, Oscar

49.

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

50.

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert