Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Hugo, Victor

Best Quotes about Criticism

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

Franklin P. Jones

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

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

Clurman, Harold

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

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

Conrad, Joseph

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

Johnson, Samuel

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

10.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

11.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

12.

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

13.

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

14.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

15.

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

Byron, Lord

16.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

17.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

18.

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.

19.

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

Hampton, Christopher

20.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

21.

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.

22.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

23.

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

24.

A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.

Shenstone, William

25.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

26.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

27.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

28.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

29.

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

Nunn, Gregory

30.

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

31.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

32.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Pollock, Channing

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

37.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

41.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

42.

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

43.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

44.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

45.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

49.

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

Richard Pryor

50.

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

Kundera, Milan