Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Turner, Ted

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

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

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

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

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

Kundera, Milan

10.

The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.

Little, Lynn M.

11.

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

Richard Pryor

12.

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

13.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Paz, Octavio

14.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

15.

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

16.

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

France, Anatole

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

20.

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

Hugo, Victor

21.

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

Elbert Hubbard

22.

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

Harold Rosenberg

23.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

24.

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.

25.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

26.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

28.

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

Bible

29.

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

Smith, Sydney

30.

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

31.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

32.

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

33.

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

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.

35.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

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

37.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

38.

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

39.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

40.

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

Jean Sibelius

41.

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

42.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

43.

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

Nunn, Gregory

44.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

45.

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

Buxton, Charles

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.

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

48.

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

Rayburn, Sam

49.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

50.

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

Burns, Robert