Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

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

Porchia, Antonio

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

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Miller, Henry

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

10.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

11.

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

12.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

13.

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

14.

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

Byron, Lord

15.

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

Nunn, Gregory

16.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

17.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

18.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

19.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

20.

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

21.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

22.

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

23.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.

Aikman, Leo

28.

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

29.

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

Briton, Crand

30.

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

31.

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

Paz, Octavio

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

38.

No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

40.

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

41.

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

Guinon, Albert

42.

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

43.

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

Steinbeck, John

44.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

46.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

James, Henry

50.

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

Johnson, Samuel