Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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.

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

Clurman, Harold

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

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

Porchia, Antonio

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

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

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

10.

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

Ziglar, Zig

11.

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

Little, Lynn M.

12.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

13.

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.

14.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Fuller, Margaret

19.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

20.

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

Burns, Robert

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

France, Anatole

24.

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

Kundera, Milan

25.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

26.

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

31.

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

32.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

33.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

34.

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

35.

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

Churchill, Charles

36.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

37.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

38.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

40.

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

41.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

42.

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

Epictetus

43.

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

Briton, Crand

44.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Benjamin, Walter

48.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

49.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

50.

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