Motivational Quotes

Criticism

When the critics come around it's always too late.

- Nolan, Sir Sidney

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Briton, Crand

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

Clurman, Harold

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

Buxton, Charles

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

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

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

Sontag, Susan

14.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

15.

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

Guinon, Albert

16.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

17.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

21.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

22.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

23.

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

24.

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

Turner, Ted

25.

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

26.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

27.

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

Nunn, Gregory

28.

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

Raphael, Frederic

29.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

31.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

32.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

33.

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

Churchill, Charles

34.

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

Smith, Sydney

35.

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

Williams, Bern

36.

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

Ziglar, Zig

37.

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

Hoffman, Dustin

38.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

39.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

40.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

41.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

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

France, Anatole

43.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

49.

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.

50.

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