Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Buxton, Charles

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

Mcclung, Nellie

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

Updike, John

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

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Hoffman, Dustin

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

10.

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

Lowell, James Russell

11.

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

Steinbeck, John

12.

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

13.

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

14.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

15.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

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.

17.

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

Byron, Lord

18.

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

Burns, Robert

19.

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

Briton, Crand

20.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

21.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

22.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

23.

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

Guinon, Albert

24.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

26.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

27.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

29.

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

30.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

31.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Paz, Octavio

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

36.

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

37.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

38.

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

France, Anatole

39.

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.

40.

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

Kundera, Milan

41.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

42.

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

43.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

44.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

45.

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.

46.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

47.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

48.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

49.

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

Costello, Elvis