Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

- Lawrence, D. H.

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Ziglar, Zig

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

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

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

Cioran, E. M.

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

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

Porchia, Antonio

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

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

10.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

11.

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

Mascotte, John P.

12.

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

Conrad, Joseph

13.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Briton, Crand

15.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

17.

A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.

Shenstone, William

18.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

19.

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

West, Rebecca

20.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

21.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

22.

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

23.

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

Buxton, Charles

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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

Guinon, Albert

28.

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

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

30.

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

31.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

32.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La

33.

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

34.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

35.

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

Franklin P. Jones

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Rostand, Jean

42.

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

Harold Rosenberg

43.

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

44.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Johnson, Samuel

45.

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

Benjamin, Walter

46.

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

France, Anatole

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.

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.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

50.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David