Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Miller, Henry

Best Quotes about Criticism

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Cocteau, Jean

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

Clurman, Harold

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

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

Pollock, Channing

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

10.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

11.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

12.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

13.

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

Mascotte, John P.

14.

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

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

16.

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

Byron, Lord

17.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

18.

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

19.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

20.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

21.

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

Turner, Ted

22.

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn't make your house look any better.

Holtz, Lou

23.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

24.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

25.

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

Guinon, Albert

26.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

27.

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

Buxton, Charles

28.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

34.

Let me walk three weeks in the footsteps of my enemy, carry the same burden, have the same trials as he, before I say one word to criticize.

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Hill, Napoleon

44.

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

45.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

46.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

47.

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

48.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

49.

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

50.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset