Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Benjamin, Walter

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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.

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

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

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

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

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

Fielding, Henry

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

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

Kundera, Milan

10.

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

11.

A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.

Shenstone, William

12.

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

13.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

Epictetus

17.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest

18.

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

Turner, Ted

19.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

20.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

21.

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

22.

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

Updike, John

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.

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

Sontag, Susan

25.

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

26.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

27.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

28.

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

Rayburn, Sam

29.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

33.

Let me walk three weeks in the footsteps of my enemy, carry the same burden, have the same trials as he, before I say one word to criticize.

34.

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

Franklin P. Jones

35.

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.

36.

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth

37.

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

38.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

40.

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

Harold Rosenberg

41.

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

Benjamin, Walter

42.

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.

43.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

44.

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

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.

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

47.

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

West, Rebecca

48.

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

49.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Johnson, Samuel

50.

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb