Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- James, Clive

Best Quotes about Criticism

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

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

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

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

Steinbeck, John

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth

10.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

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

Lowell, James Russell

12.

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

13.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

14.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

15.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

16.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

17.

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

Harold Rosenberg

18.

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

James, Clive

19.

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

Proverb, Chinese

20.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Eliot, T. S.

21.

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

France, Anatole

22.

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

Collins, Jackie

23.

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

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

26.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

27.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

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

29.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Aragon, Louis

30.

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

31.

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

Epictetus

32.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

33.

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

34.

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

Holtz, Lou

35.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

38.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

39.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

40.

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

Byron, Lord

41.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

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

43.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

44.

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

Benjamin, Walter

45.

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

46.

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

Murdoch, Iris

47.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley