Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Ziglar, Zig

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Conrad, Joseph

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

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Hugo, Victor

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

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

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

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

Miller, Henry

10.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

11.

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney

12.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

13.

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

14.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

15.

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

Holtz, Lou

16.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

17.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

18.

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

19.

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

20.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

21.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

22.

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

23.

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

Clurman, Harold

24.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

25.

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

Kael, Pauline

26.

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

27.

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

28.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

30.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

31.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

32.

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

Ziglar, Zig

33.

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

Burns, Robert

34.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

35.

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

36.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

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

38.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

39.

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

40.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

41.

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

42.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

43.

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

Guinon, Albert

44.

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

Kundera, Milan

45.

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

46.

Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.

Pollock, Channing

47.

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

48.

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

Hampton, Christopher

49.

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

50.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin