Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Carlyle, Thomas

Best Quotes about Criticism

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

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

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

Costello, Elvis

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

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

10.

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

11.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

12.

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

13.

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

Lowell, James Russell

14.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

15.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

16.

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

17.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

18.

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

Little, Lynn M.

19.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Turner, Ted

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

Aikman, Leo

29.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

31.

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

Raphael, Frederic

32.

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

Mascotte, John P.

33.

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

34.

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

Burns, Robert

35.

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

Steinbeck, John

36.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

37.

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

Hugo, Victor

38.

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

39.

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

Briton, Crand

40.

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

41.

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt

43.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Cioran, E. M.

44.

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

Hampton, Christopher

45.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

46.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

47.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

48.

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

49.

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

50.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill