CRITICISM

Related Subjects: Appreciation, Art, Censorship, Judge, Judgment, Opinion, Rebuke, Taste

1. Men might be better if we better deemed
   Of them. The worst way to improve the world
   Is to condemn it.—PHILIP J, BAILEY, Festus
   

2. The legitimate aim of criticism is to direct attention to the excellent. The bad will dig its own grave, and the imperfect may safely be left to that final neglect from which no amount of present undeserved popularity can rescue it.—C. N. BOVEE
   

3. I think that the revelation of Divine wisdom in regard to books and plays will be even more interesting than the manifestation of heavenly standards in regard to souls. I am more eager to know whether Thackeray was actually greater than Dickens than I am to find out whether Henry Ford was on the whole a better citizen of the cosmos than Napoleon Bonaparte.—HEYWOOD BROUN, The Last Review
   

4. Is it in destroying and pulling down that skill is displayed? The shallowest understanding, the rudest hand, is more than equal to that task.—BURKE
   

5. Silence is sometimes the severest criticism.—CHARLES BUXTON
   

6. Criticism is futile because it puts a man on the defensive, and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a man's precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses his resentment.—DALE CARNEGIE, How to Win Friends
   

7. It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.—DISRAELI
   

8. The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author.—DISRAELI
   

9. The artist, without respect to medium, is interested in criticism because it is a form of public opinion. Also, because it creates public opinion.—JOHN GASSNER, A Note on Criticism
   

10. 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.—SAMUEL JOHNSON, Boswell: Life
    

11. Blown about with every wind of criticism.—SAMUEL JOHNSON, Boswell: Life
    

12. Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.—SAMUEL JOHNSON, Boswell: Life
    

13. Criticism is as often a trade as a science; requiring more health than wit, more labor than capacity, more practice than genius.LA BRUYERE
    

14. The pleasure of criticism takes from us that of being deeply moved by very beautiful things.—LA BRUYERE
    

15. The strength of criticism lies only in the weakness of the thing criticised.—LONGFELLOW
    

16. The opinion of the great body of the reading public, is very materially influenced even by the unsupported assertions of those who assume a right to criticise.—MACAULAY

17. He who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fears not to declare as freely what might be done better, gives ye the best covenant of his fidelity.—MILTON
    

18. There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret the things, and more books upon books than upon all other subjects; we do nothing but comment upon one another.—MONTAIGNE, Essays
    

19. Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.—WALTER PATER, The Renaissance
    

20. Some judge of authors' names, not works, and then
    Nor praise nor blame the writing, but the men.—POPE, Essay on Criticism
    

21. Ten censure wrong, for one that writes amiss.—POPE, Essay on Criticism
    

22. Get your enemies to read your works in order to mend them; for your friend is so much your second self that he will judge too much like you.—POPE
    

23. Every one can keep house better than her mother 'til she trieth.—Proverb
    

24. Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together.—J. P. RICHTER
    

25. Criticism is the endeavor to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has been known and thought and written in the world.—SAINTSBURY, A History of Criticism
    

26. One of the commonest but most uncritical faults of criticism—the refusal to consider what it is that the author intended to give us.—SAINTSBURY, Preface to Tom Jones
    

27. Happy are they that hear their detractions, and can put them to mending.—SHAKESPEARE, Much Ado About Nothing
    

28. Of all mortals a critic is the silliest; for, inuring himself to examine all things, whether they are of consequence or not, he never looks upon anything but with a design of passing sentence upon it; by which means he is never a companion, but always a censor.—SIR RICHARD STEELE
    

29. Of all the cants in this canting world, deliver me from the cant of criticism.—STERNE
    

30. I have ever held that the rod with which popular fancy invests criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel-switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch-twig for the castigation of offenders.—ARTHUR SYMONS,
    Introduction to the Study of Browning
    

31. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.—PAUL VALERY, Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci
    

32. An age that has no criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic, and confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age that possesses no art at all.—OSCAR WILDE, The Critic as Artist