Motivational Quotes

Criticism

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

- Sontag, Susan

Best Quotes about Criticism

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

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

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

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

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

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

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

Guinon, Albert

10.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

11.

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

12.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

13.

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

14.

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

15.

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

Hoffman, Dustin

16.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

17.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Cioran, E. M.

18.

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.

19.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

20.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

21.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

22.

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

23.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

24.

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

Miller, Henry

25.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

26.

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

Steinbeck, John

27.

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

28.

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

Smith, Sydney

29.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

30.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Moliere

34.

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

Richard Pryor

35.

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

Costello, Elvis

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Benjamin, Walter

40.

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

Ziglar, Zig

41.

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

42.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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.

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

46.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

47.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

48.

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.

49.

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

Elbert Hubbard