Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Steinbeck, John

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

West, Rebecca

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

Burns, Robert

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

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

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

Little, Lynn M.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

10.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

11.

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

12.

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert

13.

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

14.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

15.

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

Fuller, Margaret

16.

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

Holtz, Lou

17.

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

Kundera, Milan

18.

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

19.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

22.

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

23.

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

Native American Proverb

24.

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

Conrad, Joseph

25.

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

Harold Rosenberg

26.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

27.

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

Cioran, E. M.

28.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

29.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Schlegel, Friedrich

30.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

31.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

32.

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

33.

A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.

Shenstone, William

34.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

35.

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

Rayburn, Sam

36.

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

Mizner, Wilson

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Churchill, Charles

40.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

41.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

42.

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

Turner, Ted

43.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Carlyle, Thomas