Motivational Quotes

Criticism

The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.

- Little, Lynn M.

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Tynan, Kenneth

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

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

10.

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

Steinbeck, John

11.

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

Williams, Bern

12.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

13.

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

14.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

15.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

16.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

18.

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

Harold Rosenberg

19.

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

20.

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

21.

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

22.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

23.

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

Nunn, Gregory

24.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

25.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

26.

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

27.

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

28.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

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

30.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

31.

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

Holtz, Lou

32.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

33.

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

Sontag, Susan

34.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

35.

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

36.

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

Shenstone, William

37.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt

38.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

39.

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

40.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

41.

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

Jean Sibelius

42.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

43.

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

44.

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

45.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

46.

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

47.

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

Kundera, Milan

48.

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