Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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.

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

11.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

12.

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

Benjamin, Walter

13.

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.

14.

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

15.

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

16.

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

James, Clive

17.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

18.

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

19.

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

20.

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

Steinbeck, John

21.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

22.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

26.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Byron, Lord

30.

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

Bible

31.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

32.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Cioran, E. M.

33.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

35.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

36.

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

37.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

38.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

39.

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

Hugo, Victor

40.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

41.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

42.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

43.

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

44.

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

Burns, Robert

45.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

46.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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.

48.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

49.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

50.

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

Native American Proverb