Motivational Quotes

Criticism

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

- Buxton, Charles

Best Quotes about Criticism

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

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

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

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

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

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

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Jean Sibelius

13.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

14.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

15.

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

Byron, Lord

16.

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

Shenstone, William

17.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

18.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

19.

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

20.

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Buxton, Charles

21.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

22.

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

Benjamin, Walter

23.

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney

24.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

25.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

26.

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

Williams, Bern

27.

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

Raphael, Frederic

28.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

29.

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn't make your house look any better.

Holtz, Lou

30.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Buxton, Charles

34.

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

35.

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

Rayburn, Sam

36.

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

Burns, Robert

37.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

38.

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

Elbert Hubbard

39.

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

40.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

41.

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

42.

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

Turner, Ted

43.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

44.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Frye, Northrop

45.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

46.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.

Mascotte, John P.

50.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken