Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

- West, Rebecca

Best Quotes about Criticism

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

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

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Hill, Napoleon

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory

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

Harold Rosenberg

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

Franklin P. Jones

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

10.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

11.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

12.

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

Steinbeck, John

13.

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

Aikman, Leo

14.

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

15.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

21.

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

Williams, Bern

22.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

23.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

24.

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

25.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

26.

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

27.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

28.

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

29.

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

30.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

31.

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

32.

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

33.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

34.

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

35.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

36.

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

37.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

38.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

39.

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.

40.

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

Kundera, Milan

41.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

42.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

43.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

44.

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

Dale Carnegie

45.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

46.

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn't make your house look any better.

Holtz, Lou

47.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

48.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

49.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

50.

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

Bible