Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Jean Sibelius

Best Quotes about Criticism

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Buxton, Charles

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Hugo, Victor

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

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

Benjamin, Walter

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

Baudelaire, Charles

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

10.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

11.

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

Paz, Octavio

12.

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.

13.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

14.

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

Buxton, Charles

15.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

20.

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

Briton, Crand

21.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

22.

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney

23.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

24.

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.

25.

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

Costello, Elvis

26.

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

27.

You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

Whistler, James Mcneill

28.

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

Franklin P. Jones

29.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

30.

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

31.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

32.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

33.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

34.

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.

35.

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

Nunn, Gregory

36.

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

Murdoch, Iris

37.

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

Guinon, Albert

38.

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

39.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

40.

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

41.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

42.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

43.

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

Williams, Bern

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

47.

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

Updike, John

48.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

49.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.