Motivational Quotes

Criticism

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

- Selye, Hans

Best Quotes about Criticism

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Gourmont, Remy De

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

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

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

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

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

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

Hoffman, Dustin

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

Aikman, Leo

13.

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

Murdoch, Iris

14.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

18.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

19.

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

Wilde, Oscar

20.

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

Little, Lynn M.

21.

Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.

Mascotte, John P.

22.

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

Williams, Bern

23.

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

24.

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

25.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

26.

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

James, Clive

27.

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

Miller, Henry

28.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

29.

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

30.

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

Bible

31.

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

32.

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

Smith, Sydney

33.

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

Clurman, Harold

34.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

35.

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

36.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

37.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

38.

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

39.

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

Porchia, Antonio

40.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

41.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

42.

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

43.

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

44.

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

Benjamin, Walter

45.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

46.

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

Paz, Octavio

47.

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb

48.

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

49.

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

Briton, Crand

50.

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

Lowell, James Russell