Motivational Quotes

Criticism

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

- Hutton, R. H.

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Steinbeck, John

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

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

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

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

James, Henry

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

10.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

11.

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.

12.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

14.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

15.

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

Harold Rosenberg

16.

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

17.

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

Holtz, Lou

18.

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

19.

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

Hugo, Victor

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

23.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

24.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

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

26.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

27.

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

Conrad, Joseph

28.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

29.

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

Kael, Pauline

30.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

31.

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

32.

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

Fielding, Henry

33.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

34.

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

Byron, Lord

35.

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

36.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

37.

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

38.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

39.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

40.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

41.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

42.

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

Elbert Hubbard

43.

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.

44.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon