Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

10.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

11.

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

12.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

13.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

14.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Johnson, Samuel

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

18.

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

19.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

20.

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

Moliere

21.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

22.

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

23.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

24.

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

25.

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

Lowell, James Russell

26.

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

27.

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

Ziglar, Zig

28.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

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

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

32.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

Briton, Crand

35.

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

36.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

37.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

39.

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

Turner, Ted

40.

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

41.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

42.

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

Churchill, Charles

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Paz, Octavio

46.

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

Sontag, Susan

47.

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

48.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

49.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

50.

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