Motivational Quotes

Criticism

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

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

Churchill, Charles

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

10.

Eliot, T. S.

11.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

12.

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

Kundera, Milan

13.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

14.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

15.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

17.

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

Byron, Lord

18.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

19.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

20.

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.

21.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

22.

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

Williams, Bern

23.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

24.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

25.

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

26.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

27.

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

28.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

29.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

30.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

31.

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

Buxton, Charles

32.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

33.

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

34.

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

Bible

35.

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

Conrad, Joseph

36.

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

37.

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

38.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

39.

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

Briton, Crand

40.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

41.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

42.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

43.

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

James, Henry

44.

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

Costello, Elvis

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

49.

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

50.

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

Hoffman, Dustin