Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotations on Critics

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.
Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist

In my wide association in life, meeting with many and great men in various parts of the world, I have yet to find the man, however great or exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than he would ever do under a spirit of criticism.
Charles M. Schwab (1862–1939) American Businessperson

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) French Poet, Art Critic, Essayist, Translator

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather than its defects.—The passions of men have made it malignant, as the bad heart of Procrustes turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) American Poet, Educator, Academic

Do not remove a fly from your friend’s forehead with a hatchet.
Chinese Proverb

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American Humorist, Journalist

Criticism should be a casual conversation.
W. H. Auden (1907–73) British-born American Poet, Dramatist

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep doing so until the end. 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, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.
Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) American Head of State

What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–94) American Physician, Essayist

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.
Anonymous

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.
Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) American Novelist

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.
Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Poet

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil’d; if right, I kiss’d the rod.
Alexander Pope (1688–1744) English Poet

Never criticize a man until you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins.
American Indian Proverb

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.
Leonardo DiCaprio (b.1974) American Actor, Film Producer

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.
Henry James (1843–1916) American-born British Novelist, Writer

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.
William Gilmore Simms (1806–70) American Poet, Historian, Novelist, Editor

One ought to look a good deal at oneself before thinking of condemning others.
Moliere (1622–73) French Playwright

A critic is a legless man who teaches running.
Channing Pollock (1880–1946) American Playwright, Critic

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.
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish Painter, Sculptor, Artist

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American Author, Journalist, Short Story Writer

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.
John Keats (1795–1821) English Poet

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.
Anatole France (1844–1924) French Novelist

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.
Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) American Novelist

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.
Margaret Fuller (1810–50) American Feminist, Writer, Revolutionary

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) American Journalist, Literary Critic

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
John Updike (1932–2009) American Novelist, Poet, Short-Story Writer

There are some critics who change everything that comes under their hands to gold; but to this privilege of Midas they join sometimes his ears.
Jean Antoine Petit-Senn (1792–1870) French-Swiss Lyric Poet

A man must serve his time to every trade
Save censure—critics are ready-made.
Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet

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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English Poet, Literary Critic, Philosopher

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