Motivational Quotes

Criticism

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

Rayburn, Sam

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

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

James, Henry

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

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

11.

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

Kundera, Milan

12.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

13.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

14.

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

Bible

15.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

16.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

17.

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

Harold Rosenberg

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

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

22.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

23.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

24.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

25.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

26.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

29.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

30.

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

31.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

32.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

33.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

34.

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

Nunn, Gregory

35.

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

36.

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

Native American Proverb

37.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

38.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

39.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

40.

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

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.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

43.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Beecher, Henry Ward

44.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

45.

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