Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Steinbeck, John

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt

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

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

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Little, Lynn M.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

10.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

11.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

16.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

17.

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

Briton, Crand

18.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

19.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

23.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

24.

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

Mizner, Wilson

25.

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

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

Hugo, Victor

27.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

34.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

35.

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

36.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

37.

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

Burns, Robert

38.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

39.

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.

40.

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

Franklin P. Jones

41.

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

42.

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

43.

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

Sontag, Susan

44.

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

Byron, Lord

45.

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

Paz, Octavio

46.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

47.

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.

48.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

49.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

50.

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