Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Mizner, Wilson

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Bible

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Conrad, Joseph

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

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

Hill, Napoleon

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

Mizner, Wilson

10.

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

Hampton, Christopher

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

West, Rebecca

14.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

15.

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

16.

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

Turner, Ted

17.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

18.

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.

19.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

21.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

22.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

23.

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

Johnson, Samuel

24.

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

Pope, Alexander

25.

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

26.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

27.

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

28.

The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.

Little, Lynn M.

29.

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

30.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Dale Carnegie

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Benjamin, Walter

37.

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

Pollock, Channing

38.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

39.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

41.

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

Franklin P. Jones

42.

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

43.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

44.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

45.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Paz, Octavio

46.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

47.

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

48.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

49.

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

50.

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

Baudelaire, Charles