Motivational Quotes

Criticism

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

- Adams, Scott

Best Quotes about Criticism

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

Flagg, Fannie

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

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

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

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

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

11.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John

12.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

13.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

14.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

15.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

16.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

17.

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

18.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

19.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

20.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

21.

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

22.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

23.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

24.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

25.

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.

26.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

27.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

28.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

29.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

30.

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

Cocteau, Jean

31.

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

32.

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

33.

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

Elbert Hubbard

34.

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

35.

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

Christopher Hampton

36.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

37.

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.

38.

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

Churchill, Charles

39.

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

40.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

41.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

42.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

43.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

44.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

48.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Eliot, T. S.

49.

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

Bible

50.

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