Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Baudrillard, Jean

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

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.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Aragon, Louis

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Guinon, Albert

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

10.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Little, Lynn M.

14.

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

Epictetus

15.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

16.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

17.

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

Proverb, Chinese

18.

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

Miller, Henry

19.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

20.

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

21.

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

22.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

Porchia, Antonio

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Clurman, Harold

28.

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

29.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

30.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Kurt Vonnegut

31.

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

Hugo, Victor

32.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

33.

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

34.

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

Raphael, Frederic

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Christopher Hampton

39.

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

Native American Proverb

40.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

41.

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

42.

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

Wilde, Oscar

43.

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

44.

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

45.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

46.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

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

Pollock, Channing

48.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

49.

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

50.

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