Motivational Quotes

Criticism

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

- Lewis, Sinclair

Best Quotes about Criticism

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

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

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

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Sontag, Susan

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

10.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

11.

Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.

Pollock, Channing

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Jean Sibelius

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

Churchill, Charles

18.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

19.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

20.

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

21.

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Miller, Henry

22.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

23.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

24.

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

Clurman, Harold

25.

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

Bible

26.

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

27.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

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

Buxton, Charles

29.

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

Porchia, Antonio

30.

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

31.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

32.

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

33.

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

34.

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

35.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

36.

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.

37.

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

Holtz, Lou

38.

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

Briton, Crand

39.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

40.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

41.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

42.

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

43.

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

Conrad, Joseph

44.

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

45.

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

Murdoch, Iris

46.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

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

48.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

49.

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

Guinon, Albert

50.

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

Elbert Hubbard