Motivational Quotes

Criticism

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

- Adams, Scott

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Carlyle, Thomas

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

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

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

Gourmont, Remy De

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

Elbert Hubbard

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

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

10.

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

11.

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

Little, Lynn M.

12.

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

Hoffman, Dustin

13.

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

14.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

15.

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.

16.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

20.

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

James, Henry

21.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

22.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

23.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

24.

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

Miller, Henry

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

28.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

29.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

30.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

31.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

32.

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

33.

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

34.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

35.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

36.

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

Aikman, Leo

37.

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

Guinon, Albert

38.

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

39.

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

Cocteau, Jean

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

43.

Honest criticism is hard to take, especially from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

Jones, Franklin P.

44.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

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

Lowell, James Russell

49.

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

50.

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