Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Churchill, Charles

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

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

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

Shenstone, William

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

Elbert Hubbard

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

Murdoch, Iris

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

10.

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

11.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

12.

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

Johnson, Samuel

13.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

14.

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

Kundera, Milan

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Frye, Northrop

18.

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

Byron, Lord

19.

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

Guinon, Albert

20.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

21.

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

22.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

23.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

24.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

25.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

26.

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.

27.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb

31.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

33.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

34.

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

Kael, Pauline

35.

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

Pope, Alexander

36.

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

37.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

38.

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

39.

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

40.

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

41.

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

Little, Lynn M.

42.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

43.

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

44.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

45.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

46.

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

Smith, Sydney

47.

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

48.

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

Hugo, Victor

49.

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

50.

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

Tynan, Kenneth