Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

- Rayburn, Sam

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

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

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

Holtz, Lou

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

Carlyle, Thomas

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Briton, Crand

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

10.

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

11.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

12.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

13.

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

Hugo, Victor

14.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

15.

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

16.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

17.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

18.

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

Johnson, Samuel

19.

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

Little, Lynn M.

20.

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

21.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

22.

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

23.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

24.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

25.

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

Kundera, Milan

26.

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

Ziglar, Zig

27.

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

Aikman, Leo

28.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

29.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

30.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

32.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

33.

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

34.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

35.

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

36.

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

Byron, Lord

37.

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

38.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

39.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

40.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

44.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

45.

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

Churchill, Charles

46.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

47.

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

Raphael, Frederic

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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