Motivational Quotes

Criticism

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

- Symons, Arthur

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Updike, John

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.

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

Harold Rosenberg

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

Epictetus

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

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

Sontag, Susan

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

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

Guinon, Albert

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

15.

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

Mizner, Wilson

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

19.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

20.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

21.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

22.

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

23.

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

Ziglar, Zig

24.

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

Dale Carnegie

25.

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

26.

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

Burns, Robert

27.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

28.

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

Kundera, Milan

29.

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

Bible

30.

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.

31.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

32.

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

Churchill, Charles

33.

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

Proverb, Chinese

34.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

35.

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

Cocteau, Jean

36.

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

Steinbeck, John

37.

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

38.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

39.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

40.

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

Mascotte, John P.

41.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

45.

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.

46.

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