Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Churchill, Charles

Best Quotes about Criticism

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

Tynan, Kenneth

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

10.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

11.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

12.

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

Hampton, Christopher

13.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

14.

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

Briton, Crand

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.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

17.

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

Hill, Napoleon

18.

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

19.

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

Steinbeck, John

20.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

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.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

23.

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

Sontag, Susan

24.

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

25.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

26.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

27.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

28.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

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

30.

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

Native American Proverb

31.

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

32.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

36.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

38.

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

39.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

40.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

43.

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

Updike, John

44.

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

Epictetus

45.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

46.

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

47.

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

Ziglar, Zig

48.

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

49.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

50.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David