Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

James, Henry

10.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

11.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Bible

14.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

15.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

16.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

17.

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

Rostand, Jean

18.

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

19.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

20.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

21.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

22.

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

Elbert Hubbard

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.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

25.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

26.

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

Paz, Octavio

27.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Byron, Lord

32.

Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.

Mascotte, John P.

33.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

35.

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

Smith, Sydney

36.

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

37.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Harold Rosenberg

39.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

40.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

41.

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

42.

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

Guinon, Albert

43.

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

Moliere

44.

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

45.

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

Murdoch, Iris

46.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

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

Williams, Bern

48.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

49.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

50.

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore