Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Baudelaire, Charles

Best Quotes about Criticism

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.

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

Elbert Hubbard

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

Burns, Robert

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

Hugo, Victor

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

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

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

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

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

10.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

11.

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

Conrad, Joseph

12.

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

13.

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

Benjamin, Walter

14.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

15.

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

16.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

17.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John

18.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

19.

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

Christopher Hampton

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

23.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Johnson, Samuel

24.

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

Richard Pryor

25.

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

26.

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

Costello, Elvis

27.

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

28.

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

29.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

33.

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

34.

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

Hill, Napoleon

35.

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

Ziglar, Zig

36.

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

37.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

38.

Let me walk three weeks in the footsteps of my enemy, carry the same burden, have the same trials as he, before I say one word to criticize.

39.

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

Paz, Octavio

40.

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

Nunn, Gregory

41.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

42.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

43.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

45.

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

Hampton, Christopher

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius