Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Churchill, Charles

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Baudrillard, Jean

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

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

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

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

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

Wilde, Oscar

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

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.

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

12.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

13.

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

Cioran, E. M.

14.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

15.

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

Bible

16.

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

Elbert Hubbard

17.

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

Rayburn, Sam

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

21.

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

Ziglar, Zig

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

25.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

26.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

27.

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

Williams, Bern

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Steinbeck, John

31.

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

Holtz, Lou

32.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

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

34.

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

West, Rebecca

35.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

36.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

37.

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

Cocteau, Jean

38.

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

Murdoch, Iris

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

41.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

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

Turner, Ted

43.

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

44.

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

45.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

46.

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

Lowell, James Russell

47.

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

48.

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

Aikman, Leo

49.

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

50.

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Hemingway, Ernest