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Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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
Criticism Motivational Quotes



Best Quotes about Criticism

1.
It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.
Disraeli, Benjamin

2.
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

3.
If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.
Lincoln, Abraham

4.
Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.
Proverb, Chinese

5.
Criticism should be a casual conversation.
Auden, W. H.

6.
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

7.
A sneer is the weapon of the weak.
Lowell, James Russell

8.
The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.
Algren, Nelson

9.
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.

10.
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

11.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
Christopher Hampton

12.
Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.
Hammarskjold, Dag

13.
A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.
Shenstone, William

14.
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

15.
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

16.
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

17.
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.

18.
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.
James, Henry

19.
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

20.
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.

21.
I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.
Johnson, Samuel

22.
A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.
Lowell, James Russell

23.
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

24.
The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.
Gibbon, Edward

25.
Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.
Zeuxis

26.
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

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.
Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.
Smullyan, Raymond

29.
When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.
Guinon, Albert

30.
No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.
Harold Rosenberg

31.
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

32.
Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.
Bible

33.
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

34.
Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.
Miller, Henry

35.
Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!
Sterne, Laurence

36.
As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.
James, Clive

37.
Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.
Native American Proverb

38.
The dread of criticism is the death of genius.
Simms, William Gilmore

39.
Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.
Proverb, Chinese

40.
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
Orwell, George

41.
Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!
James, Henry

42.
Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.
Chandler, Raymond

43.
They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.
Porchia, Antonio

44.
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

45.
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

46.
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
Kundera, Milan

47.
A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.
Hoffman, Dustin

48.
Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

49.
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

50.
A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.
Schlegel, Friedrich


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