Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Kundera, Milan

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

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Mizner, Wilson

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

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

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

10.

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

Williams, Bern

11.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

12.

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

Briton, Crand

13.

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

Hill, Napoleon

14.

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

Burns, Robert

15.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

16.

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.

17.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

18.

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

Richard Pryor

19.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

20.

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.

21.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

22.

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Miller, Henry

23.

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

West, Rebecca

24.

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.

25.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

26.

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

Ziglar, Zig

27.

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

28.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

29.

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

30.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Beecher, Henry Ward

31.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

32.

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

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.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

Miller, Henry

37.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

38.

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

Holtz, Lou

39.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

40.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

41.

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

Hoffman, Dustin

42.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

44.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

45.

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

46.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

47.

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

48.

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

49.

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

50.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie