Criticism Quotes

“The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible."

[Defend the right to be offended (openDemocracy, 7 February 2005)]”
― Salman Rushdie

“If you find yourself criticizing other people, you're probably doing it out of Resistance. When we see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived out our own.
Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others. if they speak at all, it is to offer encouragement. Watch yourself. Of all the manifestations of Resistance, most only harm ourselves. Criticism and cruelty harm others as well.”
― Stephen Pressfield

“You should praise, criticize and flirt with people right to their face, only then it will make a difference.”
― Amit Kalantri

“Never take advice about never taking advice. That is an old vice of men - to dish it out without being able to take it - the blind leading the blind into more blindness.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“The tower of success stands on the pillars of vision, action, patience and the character to withstand criticisms.”
― Amit Ray, Walking the Path of Compassion

“Success needs vision to see, passion to transcend, patience to withstand and the character to overcome failures.”
― Amit Ray, Walking the Path of Compassion

“Now, if there were an Olympics for misleading, mismanaging and misappropriating then this administration would take the gold, world-records for violations of national and international law. They want another four year term to continue to alienate our allies, spend our children's inheritance and hollow out the economy. We cannot afford another Republican administration.”
― Dennis Kucinich

“If only it were as easy to do the work of others
as it is to criticize their performance.”
― Dan Poynter

“[A] writer’s most powerful weapon, his true strength, was his intuition, and regardless of whether he had any talent, if the critics combined to discredit an author’s nose for things, he would be reduced to a fearful creature who took a mistakenly guarded, absurdly cautious approach to his work, which would end up stifling his latent genius.”
― Félix J. Palma, The Map of Time

“There are some who never try, get left behind, forever dying, they just sit it by on the sidelines while they criticize, hide and scrutinize; but then there are others who are tough enough, who stand to risk their wrongs, flying high, as they rise up in this life and thus, fight right through the lies.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Ah, but sir,' said Lascelles, 'it is precisely by passing judgments upon other people's work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your own opinions better. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one's own ends. One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the article one may develop one's theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body else does.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
   To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
     The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The popular distinction between 'constructive' and 'destructive' criticism is a sentimentality: the mind too weak to perceive in what respects the bad fails is not strong enough to appreciate in what the good succeeds. To be without discrimination is to be unable to praise. The critic who lets you know that he always looks for something to like in works he discusses is not telling you anything about the works or about art; he is saying 'see what a nice person I am.”
― Brigid Brophy, Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without

“This mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people—because, surely, Wally was nice—would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At. St. Cloud's, criticism was plainer—and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.”
― John Irving, The Cider House Rules

“Bosch is great because what he imagines in color can be translated into justice.”
― Edward Dahlberg

“At that shameful stage in the development of our criticism, literary abuse would overstep all limits of decorum; literature itself was a totally extraneous matter in critical articles: they were pure invective, a vulgar battle of vulgar jokes, double-entendres, the most vicious calumnies and offensive constructions. It goes without saying, that in this inglorious battle, the only winners were those who had nothing to lose as far as their good name was concerned. My friends and I were totally deluded. We imagined ourselves engaged in the subtle philosophical disputes of the portico or the academy, or at least the drawing room. In actual fact we were slumming it.”
― Vladimir Odoevsky

“There is only one thing left for you to do,” John Sloan advised one artist. “Pull off your socks and try with your feet.”
― Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia 1910-1960

“There is a common tendency to turn off one's imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one can keep one's clear conscience and one's moral indignation unsullied.”
― John Fraser, Violence in the Arts

“If Patti Lupone was born to play Evita then Madonna was born to play Patti Lupone playing Evita.”
― Buck Bannister

“If you find yourself criticizing other people, your probably doing it out of Resistance. When we see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived out our own.
Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others. if they speak at all, it is to offer encouragement. Watch yourself. Of all the manifestations of Resistance, most only harm ourselves. Criticism and cruelty harm others as well.”
― Stephen Pressfield

“A rapidez e a concisão do estilo agradam porque apresentam à alma uma turba de idéias simultâneas, ou cuja sucessão é tão rápida que parecem simultâneas, e fazem a alma ondular numa tal abundância de pensamento, imagens ou sensações espirituais, que ela ou não consegue abraçá-las todas de uma vez nem inteiramente a cada uma, ou não tem tempo de permanecer ociosa e desprovida de sensações. A força do estilo poético, que em grande parte se identifica com a rapidez, não nos deleita senão por esses efeitos, e não consiste senão disso. A excitação das idéias simultâneas pode ser provocada tanto por uma idéia isolada, no sentido próprio ou metafórico, quando por sua colocação na frase, ou pela sua elaboração, bem como pela simples supressão de outras palavras ou frases etc.”
― Giacomo Leopardi

“When sonneteering Wordsworth re-creates the landing of Mary Queen of Scots at the mouth of the Derwent -

Dear to the Loves, and to the Graces vowed,
The Queen drew back the wimple that she wore

- he unveils nothing less than a canvas by Rubens, baroque master of baroque masters; this is the landing of a TRAGIC Marie de Medicis.
Yet so receptive was the English ear to sheep-Wordsworth's perverse 'Enough of Art' that it is not any of these works of supreme art, these master-sonnets of English literature, that are sold as picture postcards, with the text in lieu of the view, in the Lake District! it is those eternally, infernally sprightly Daffodils.”
― Brigid Brophy, Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without

“One of the universally despised sins is hypocrisy, falsely pretending to hold beliefs, feelings, standards qualities, opinions, virtues, motivations, or other characteristics that a person does not actually hold. Powerful people tend to be the greatest hypocrites, which accounts for why scandal, false preachers, and mealy-mouthed persons are so prevalent in bastions of reigning political parties. Hypocrisy occurs because some people are too lazy, weak-willed, or stupid to live up to their professed beliefs. It also occurs because of a propensity of people to engage in self-deception and self-ignorance, reliance upon fabricated (“pseudo evidence”) perceived through a self-serving bias, failure to challenge personal beliefs and behavior, and refusal to listen to justified criticism.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“She has very high standards." "Maybe. Or maybe she's-and I'm having trouble putting this in a nonjudgemental away-maybe she's got into the habit of criticising you and hasn't paid attention to how much that messes you up.”
― Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material

“Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among 'intellectuals', that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus to end by enjoying almost nothing in literature but one's own opinions, while oneself incapable of writing a living sentence.”
― F.L. Lucas, Style

“Relentless criticism in childhood can internalize a parental scorn that no amount of success will silence.”
― Bruce Watson

“Richard Wright, a Mississippi-born negro, has written a blinding and corrosive study in hate. It is a novel entitled "Native Son".”
― David L. Cohn

“When did most of us stop being poets?”
― Michael St. George

“¿No sabéis quiénes son los críticos? Aquellos que no han tenido éxito en la literatura y en el arte.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

“Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-pulling, but guiding, instructive, and inspirational--a south wind and not an east wind.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson