Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

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

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Richard Pryor

10.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

11.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

12.

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

Aikman, Leo

13.

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

14.

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

Clurman, Harold

15.

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

Jean Sibelius

16.

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

17.

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

Paz, Octavio

18.

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

Franklin P. Jones

19.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

20.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

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.

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

23.

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

Moliere

24.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

25.

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

Murdoch, Iris

26.

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

27.

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

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

29.

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

Byron, Lord

30.

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

Sontag, Susan

31.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

32.

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

West, Rebecca

33.

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

34.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

35.

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

Mascotte, John P.

36.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

37.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

Benjamin, Walter

43.

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

Pollock, Channing

44.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

45.

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

Miller, Henry

46.

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

47.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

48.

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

49.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

50.

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