Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Pollock, Channing

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

Williams, Bern

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

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

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

11.

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney

12.

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

13.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

14.

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

Steinbeck, John

15.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

16.

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

Nunn, Gregory

17.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

18.

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

Byron, Lord

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Raphael, Frederic

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Little, Lynn M.

27.

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

Conrad, Joseph

28.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

29.

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

Shenstone, William

30.

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.

31.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

32.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

36.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

37.

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

38.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

39.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

40.

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

41.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

42.

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

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.

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

Mizner, Wilson

48.

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

49.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

50.

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

Porchia, Antonio