Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Schlegel, Friedrich

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Carlyle, Thomas

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

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

Benjamin, Walter

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

Cocteau, Jean

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

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

Churchill, Charles

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

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

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

10.

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Hemingway, Ernest

11.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

12.

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

13.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

14.

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

Dale Carnegie

15.

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

16.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

17.

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

18.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

19.

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

20.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

21.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

23.

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

24.

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

Turner, Ted

25.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

26.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

27.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

28.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

29.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

30.

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

31.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

32.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

33.

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

34.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

35.

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

36.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

37.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

38.

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

Clurman, Harold

39.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

41.

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

42.

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

Mizner, Wilson

43.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

44.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

45.

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

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.

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

Miller, Henry

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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