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

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Fuller, Margaret

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

Williams, Bern

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

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

Paz, Octavio

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

10.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

11.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

12.

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

13.

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Buxton, Charles

14.

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

15.

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

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.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

18.

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

Conrad, Joseph

19.

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

Wilde, Oscar

20.

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

Hugo, Victor

21.

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

Epictetus

22.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

23.

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

24.

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

Guinon, Albert

25.

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

Cocteau, Jean

26.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

27.

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

Dale Carnegie

28.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

29.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

31.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

32.

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

33.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

34.

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

35.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

36.

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

Briton, Crand

37.

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

38.

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

Little, Lynn M.

39.

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.

40.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

41.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Eliot, T. S.

42.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

43.

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

44.

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

Updike, John

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

50.

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

Kael, Pauline