Motivational Quotes

Criticism

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

- W. H. Auden

Best Quotes about Criticism

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Baudrillard, Jean

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

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

Smith, Sydney

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

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Cioran, E. M.

10.

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

Guinon, Albert

11.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

James, Clive

15.

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

16.

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

Kael, Pauline

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Miller, Henry

22.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

23.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

24.

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

Hugo, Victor

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

28.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

29.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

30.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La

31.

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

Johnson, Samuel

32.

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

33.

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

34.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

35.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

36.

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

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.

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

39.

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

Little, Lynn M.

40.

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

41.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

42.

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

Burns, Robert

43.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

44.

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

Jean Sibelius

45.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

48.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

49.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

50.

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

Aikman, Leo