Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Tynan, Kenneth

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

Guinon, Albert

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

Gourmont, Remy De

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Nunn, Gregory

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

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

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella

13.

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

Hugo, Victor

14.

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.

15.

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

Briton, Crand

16.

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

17.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

18.

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

Mizner, Wilson

19.

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

20.

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

21.

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

22.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Hill, Napoleon

28.

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

29.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

30.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

31.

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

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

35.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

36.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

37.

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

Burns, Robert

38.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

39.

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

40.

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

Murdoch, Iris

41.

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.

42.

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

43.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

44.

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

Aikman, Leo

45.

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

Wilde, Oscar

46.

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

47.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

49.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

50.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor