Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Mcluhan, Marshall

Best Quotes about Criticism

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Buxton, Charles

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

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

Aikman, Leo

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

Churchill, Charles

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

13.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

14.

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

Byron, Lord

15.

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

16.

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

Raphael, Frederic

17.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

18.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

19.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

20.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

21.

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

22.

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

23.

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

Miller, Henry

24.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

25.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

26.

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

Mascotte, John P.

27.

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

Conrad, Joseph

28.

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

29.

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

Nunn, Gregory

30.

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

31.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Sontag, Susan

33.

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

West, Rebecca

34.

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

35.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

36.

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

Hill, Napoleon

37.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

38.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

39.

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

40.

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

Proverb, Chinese

41.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Smith, Sydney

45.

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

46.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

47.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

48.

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

49.

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

Collins, Jackie

50.

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