Motivational Quotes

Criticism

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

- Tynan, Kenneth

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

10.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

11.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

12.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

14.

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

15.

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

Elbert Hubbard

16.

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

Harold Rosenberg

17.

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

18.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

19.

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

20.

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

21.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

22.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

23.

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

27.

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

Dale Carnegie

28.

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

29.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

34.

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

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Smith, Sydney

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.

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

39.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

40.

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

Aikman, Leo

41.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

43.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

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

45.

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

Little, Lynn M.

46.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

47.

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.

48.

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella

49.

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

50.

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

Johnson, Samuel