Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Miller, Henry

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Hill, Napoleon

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

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

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Kael, Pauline

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

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

13.

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

14.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

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.

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.

17.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

18.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

19.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

20.

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

21.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

22.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

23.

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

24.

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

Williams, Bern

25.

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

Cocteau, Jean

26.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

27.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

28.

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

29.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

30.

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

Elbert Hubbard

31.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

32.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

33.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

34.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

35.

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

36.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

37.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

38.

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

Churchill, Charles

39.

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

40.

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

West, Rebecca

41.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

42.

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

43.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

44.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

45.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

46.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

47.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

48.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

49.

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

50.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo