Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Mcluhan, Marshall

Best Quotes about Criticism

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

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

Jean Sibelius

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

Steinbeck, John

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

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

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

Proverb, Chinese

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

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

10.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

11.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

12.

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.

13.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

14.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

22.

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb

23.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

24.

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

25.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

26.

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

Mizner, Wilson

27.

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

Williams, Bern

28.

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

29.

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

Miller, Henry

30.

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

Flagg, Fannie

31.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Aragon, Louis

32.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

33.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

34.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

35.

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

Porchia, Antonio

36.

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

Benjamin, Walter

37.

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

Ziglar, Zig

38.

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

39.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

40.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

41.

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

Aikman, Leo

42.

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

43.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert

45.

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

West, Rebecca

46.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

47.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

48.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

49.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

50.

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