Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

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

Holtz, Lou

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George

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

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

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

10.

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

11.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

12.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

13.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

14.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

15.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

17.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

18.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Johnson, Samuel

19.

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.

20.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

25.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Benjamin, Walter

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

29.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

30.

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

Pope, Alexander

31.

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

32.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

33.

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

34.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

35.

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

Kundera, Milan

36.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

37.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

38.

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

Hampton, Christopher

39.

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

Costello, Elvis

40.

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

Sontag, Susan

41.

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.

42.

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

Steinbeck, John

43.

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

Dale Carnegie

44.

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

Flagg, Fannie

45.

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

James, Henry

46.

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

Lowell, James Russell

47.

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.

48.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

49.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

50.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth