Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Porchia, Antonio

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

Lowell, James Russell

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

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

Jean Sibelius

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

Cioran, E. M.

10.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

11.

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

Little, Lynn M.

12.

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

13.

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

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

15.

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

Updike, John

16.

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

James, Clive

17.

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

Williams, Bern

18.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

19.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

20.

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

Dale Carnegie

21.

Wilder, Thornton

22.

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

23.

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

Hill, Napoleon

24.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

25.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

26.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

27.

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

28.

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

Elbert Hubbard

29.

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

30.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

37.

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

38.

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

39.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Turner, Ted

44.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Benjamin, Walter

45.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

46.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

47.

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

48.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

49.

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

50.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo