Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Criticism.
Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!
Henry James
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.
Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.
Virginia Woolf
When the critics come around it's always too late.
Sir Sidney Nolan
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Pauline Kael
You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.
Lord Melbourne
Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.
Fran Lebowitz
The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.
Camille Anna Paglia
All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.
Gregory Nunn
Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.
Tacitus
I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
Mark Twain
Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.
Alexander Pope
We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.
Jose Narosky
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!
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics.
C.S. Lewis
Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.
Channing Pollock
A critic is a legless man who teaches running.
Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.
Crand Briton
A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.
William Shenstone
Their rebukes have never made me angry, because I have always wondered why they did not rebuke me more. They should have. Their friendly praise has been one of the sweetest, most warming things in my life in the theater. I do go on the stage unafraid of them and with love in my heart for them.
Minnie Maddern Fiske, Mrs. Fiske
