Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Paz, Octavio

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

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

Bible

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

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

Briton, Crand

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

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

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

10.

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

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.

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

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

Byron, Lord

14.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

15.

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

16.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Frye, Northrop

17.

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

Little, Lynn M.

18.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

19.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

20.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

21.

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

22.

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

Elbert Hubbard

23.

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

Smith, Sydney

24.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

25.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

26.

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

27.

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

Costello, Elvis

28.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

29.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

31.

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

Pollock, Channing

32.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

33.

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

Sontag, Susan

34.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

35.

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

Aikman, Leo

36.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

37.

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

38.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

39.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

40.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

41.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John

42.

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

43.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

44.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

45.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

46.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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.

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

49.

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

Turner, Ted

50.

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.