Motivational Quotes

Criticism

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

- Maugham, W. Somerset

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Smith, Sydney

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 those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

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

Flagg, Fannie

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

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

Shenstone, William

10.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

11.

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

Johnson, Samuel

12.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

13.

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

Clurman, Harold

14.

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

15.

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

Christopher Hampton

16.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

17.

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

Kael, Pauline

18.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

19.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

20.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

21.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

22.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

23.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

25.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

32.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

34.

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

35.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

36.

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

37.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

38.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

45.

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

Wilde, Oscar

46.

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

Aikman, Leo

47.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

48.

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

Steinbeck, John

49.

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

50.

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