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

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

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

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

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

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Miller, Henry

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

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

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 pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

10.

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

Proverb, Chinese

11.

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

12.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

13.

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

Ziglar, Zig

14.

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

Holtz, Lou

15.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

17.

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

Updike, John

18.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

20.

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

21.

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

Mascotte, John P.

22.

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

23.

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

Little, Lynn M.

24.

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

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

West, Rebecca

26.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La

27.

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

Williams, Bern

28.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

30.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

Steinbeck, John

34.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

35.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

36.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

37.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Fuller, Margaret

41.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

42.

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

Native American Proverb

43.

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

44.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Paz, Octavio

45.

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

46.

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

James, Henry

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

Sontag, Susan