Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Helvetius, Claude A.

Best Quotes about Criticism

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

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

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

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

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

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

Mizner, Wilson

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

Nunn, Gregory

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

Richard Pryor

10.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

11.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

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

13.

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

Steinbeck, John

14.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

15.

Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.

Pollock, Channing

16.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

17.

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

18.

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

19.

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

20.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

21.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

22.

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

23.

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

Holtz, Lou

24.

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

Harold Rosenberg

25.

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

France, Anatole

26.

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

Dale Carnegie

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.

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

Elbert Hubbard

29.

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

Sontag, Susan

30.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

31.

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

Williams, Bern

32.

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

33.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

34.

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

Aikman, Leo

35.

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella

36.

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

Kundera, Milan

37.

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

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.

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

Flagg, Fannie

40.

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

Updike, John

41.

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

42.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

43.

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

44.

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

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.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

48.

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

Costello, Elvis

49.

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