Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

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

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

Fuller, Margaret

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

Ziglar, Zig

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

Williams, Bern

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

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

10.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

11.

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

Johnson, Samuel

12.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

13.

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

14.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

15.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

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.

17.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John

18.

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

19.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

20.

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

Murdoch, Iris

21.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

22.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

23.

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

Clurman, Harold

24.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

25.

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.

Aikman, Leo

26.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

27.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

28.

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

29.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Kurt Vonnegut

30.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

31.

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

Porchia, Antonio

32.

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

France, Anatole

33.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

38.

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

39.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

40.

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

Mizner, Wilson

41.

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

Mascotte, John P.

42.

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

43.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

44.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

45.

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

46.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

Steinbeck, John

50.

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.