Motivational Quotes

Criticism

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Rayburn, Sam

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

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

Jean Sibelius

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

West, Rebecca

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

Harold Rosenberg

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Miller, Henry

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

Updike, John

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

10.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

14.

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

Williams, Bern

15.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

16.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

17.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

18.

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

Kundera, Milan

19.

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

20.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

21.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

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

23.

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

Cioran, E. M.

24.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

25.

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

Bible

26.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

28.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

29.

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

30.

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

Elbert Hubbard

31.

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

Ziglar, Zig

32.

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

33.

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

Kundera, Milan

34.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

35.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

36.

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

37.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

38.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

41.

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

Smith, Sydney

42.

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

Lowell, James Russell

43.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

47.

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

48.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

49.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

50.

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

Baudelaire, Charles