Moralist Criticism Quotes

Not many people like it when they get criticism. Of course, if you have someone who does tell you and you do have a rapport, that's great. But don't rely on it. You have to rely on yourself. ~ Itzhak Perlman

There are come Critics so with Spleen diseased, They scarcely come inclining to be pleased: And sure he must have more than mortal Skill, Who please one against his Will. ~ William Congreve

God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

The biggest difference between Jesus Christ and ethical and moral teachers who have been deified by man. Is that these moralists came to make bad people good. Jesus came to make dead people live! ~ Ravi Zacharias

A lot of food criticism has a similar flavor to it, and I'm probably going to write about it in a different way. ~ Alex Kapranos

In much of today's popular culture, the virtues of forgiveness and kindness are belittled, while ridicule, anger, and harsh criticism are encouraged. Let us not hurt the ones we love the most by selfish criticism! ~ David E. Sorensen

Herr Kafka, essen Sie keine Eier." (As one and only piece of dialog K recalls from his meeting with Rudolf Steiner - "Mr. Kafka don't eat eggs. ~ Franz Kafka

The proof of true love is to be unsparing in criticism. ~ Moliere

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. ~ Saul Alinsky

Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

In this age of consumerism film criticism all over the world - in America first but also in Europe - has become something that caters for the movie industry instead of being a counterbalance. ~ Wim Wenders

President's brilliant theory of vending his wares direct to the people - was perhaps the only one who had suspicions. He had once written a brilliant criticism to some inquirer, in which he had said that no enterprise of such magnitude as the Northern Pacific had ever before been entirely dependent upon one house, or rather upon one man, and that he did not like it. I am not sure that the lands through which the road runs are so unparalleled in climate, soil, timber, minerals, etc., as Mr. Cooke and his friends would have us believe. Neither do I think that the road ~ Theodore Dreiser

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.
[Writer's Digest, September 1961] ~ Harper Lee

Good writers practice. They take time to write, crafting and editing a piece until it's just right. They spend hours and days just revising. Good writers take criticism on the chin and say "thank you" to helpful feedback; they listen to both the external and internal voices that drive them. And they use it all to make their writing better. They're resigned to the fact that first drafts suck and that the true mark of a champion is a commitment to the craft. It's not about writing in spurts of inspiration. It's about doing the work, day-in and day-out. Good writers push through because they believe in what they're doing. They understand this is more than a profession or hobby. It's a calling, a vocation. ~ Jeff Goins

Lie naked on the table, and let them cut. Criticism is surgery, and humility is the anesthetic that allows you to tolerate it. In the end, the process will make you a stronger, more flexible, and truly creative writer. It will replace attitude with genuine confidence, and empty arrogance with artistry. ~ Molly Cochran

In order to figure this artmaking stuff out, it's trial and error and experimentation, and takes some time and hard thinking. Putting work out in many forms and stages is an extension of how I see things. I feel the art process is best served when it invites comments and constructive criticism from people. ~ Jim Goldberg

One day I will write something that evades criticism. One day I will also learn to fire lasers out of my ass ~ Me

We are frequently being reminded that no criticism or teaching is ever completely politically "innocent." True, but should we accept the swing to the indoctrination of an unqualifiedly negative attitude, which fosters a sense of alienation, of being a powerless victim? And should we permit a simplistic view of "power" to trigger simplistic notions of alternatives and processes of social change? ~ Louise M. Rosenblatt

Domination and critique have always formed an apparatus covertly against a common hostis: the conspirator, who works under cover, who used everything THEY give him and everything THEY attribute to him as a mask. The conspirator is everywhere hated, although THEY will never hate him as much as he enjoys playing his game. No doubt a certain amount of what one usually calls "perversion" accounts for the pleasure, since what he enjoys, among other things, is his opacity. But that isn't the reason THEY continue to push the conspirator to make himself a critic, to subjectivate himself as critic, nor the reason for the hate THEY so commonly express. The reason is quite simply the danger he represents. The danger, for Empire, is war machines: that one person, that people transform themselves into war machines, ORGANICALLY JOIN THEIR TASTE FOR LIFE AND THEIR TASTE FOR DESTRUCTION. ~ Tiqqun

Had she any respect for him at all, his words would've affected her. But no value accompanies comments spewed from the mouth of a brute. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

According to the gospels, Christ healed diseases, cast out devils, rebuked the sea, cured the blind, fed multitudes with five loaves and two fishes, walked on the sea, cursed a fig tree, turned water into wine and raised the dead.

How is it possible to substantiate these miracles?

The Jews, among whom they were said to have been performed, did not believe them. The diseased, the palsied, the leprous, the blind who were cured, did not become followers of Christ. Those that were raised from the dead were never heard of again.
Can we believe that Christ raised the dead?

A widow living in Nain is following the body of her son to the tomb. Christ halts the funeral procession and raises the young man from the dead and gives him back to the arms of his mother.

This young man disappears. He is never heard of again. No one takes the slightest interest in the man who returned from the realm of death. Luke is the only one who tells the story. Maybe Matthew, Mark and John never heard of it, or did not believe it and so failed to record it.

John says that Lazarus was raised from the dead.

It was more wonderful than the raising of the widow's son. He had not been laid in the tomb for days. He was only on his way to the grave, but Lazarus was actually dead. He had begun to decay.

Lazarus did not excite the least interest. No one asked him about the other world. No one inquired of him about their dead friends.< ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

[His research into biblical criticism had lead him to the conclusion that most of what was contained in traditional religion simply wasn't true]
Was I to lie in order to teach the truth? ... Was I to repeat these words? It was impossible. It was certain they would stick in my throat. On these grounds the separation was decided by me. ~ Felix Adler

Blame where you must, be candid where you can, And be each critic the Good-natured Man. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

The eyes of critics, whether in commending or carping, are both on one side, like a turbot's. ~ Walter Savage Landor

Compliments and criticism are all ultimately based on some form of projection. ~ Billy Corgan

Because it is written by a nineteenth-century American, and because of its closeness to the twentieth century, The Portrait of a Lady foregoes Victorian affirmations. The price it pays, however (together with several twentieth-century novels) is that it eventually leaves the reader, along with its heroine, 'en Vair' amid its self-reflections. ~ Ian Gregor

Don't abuse your friends and expect them to consider it criticism. ~ E.W. Howe

Criticism is the best test of such work, for it will show her both unsuspected merits and faults, and help her to do better next time. We are too partial; but the praise and blame of outsiders will prove useful... ~ Louisa May Alcott

Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration. ~ Octavio Paz

The concept of an author, the single creative person who gives the text 'authority', only comes later in this period. Most Old English poetry is anonymous, even though names which are in no way comparable, such as Caedmon and Deor, are used to identify single texts. Caedmon and Deor might indeed be as mythical as Grendel, might be the originators of the texts which bear their names, or, in Deor's case only, the persona whose first-person voice narrates the poem. Only Cynewulf 'signed' his works, anticipating the role of the 'author' by some four hundred years. ~ Ronald Carter

From time to time our national history has been marred by forgetfulness of the Jeffersonian principle that restraint is at the heart of liberty. In 1789 the Federalists adopted Alien and Sedition Acts in a shabby political effort to isolate the Republic from the world and to punish political criticism as seditious libel. In 1865 the Radical Republicans sought to snare private conscience in a web of oaths and affirmations of loyalty. Spokesmen for the South did service for the Nation in resisting the petty tyranny of distrustful vengeance. In the 1920's the Attorney General of the United States degraded his office by hunting political radicals as if they were Salem witches. The Nation's only gain from his efforts were the classic dissents of Holmes and Brandeis.

In our own times, the old blunt instruments have again been put to work. The States have followed in the footsteps of the Federalists and have put Alien and Sedition Acts upon their statute books. An epidemic of loyalty oaths has spread across the Nation until no town or village seems to feel secure until its servants have purged themselves of all suspicion of non-conformity by swearing to their political cleanliness.

Those who love the twilight speak as if public education must be training in conformity, and government support of science be public aid of caution.

We have also seen a sharpening and refinement of abusive power. The legislative investigation, designed and often exercised ~ John F. Kennedy

In literary and art criticism there are two criteria, the political and the artistic. ~ Mao Zedong

We are all poor; but there is a difference between what Mrs. Spark intends by speaking of 'slender means', and what Stevens called our poverty or Sartre our need, besoin. The poet finds his brief, fortuitous concords, it is true: not merely 'what will suffice,' but 'the freshness of transformation,' the 'reality of decreation,' the 'gaiety of language.' The novelist accepts need, the difficulty of relating one's fictions to what one knows about the nature of reality, as his donnée.

It is because no one has said more about this situation, or given such an idea of its complexity, that I want to devote most of this talk to Sartre and the most relevant of his novels, La Nausée. As things go now it isn't of course very modern; Robbe-Grillet treats it with amused reverence as a valuable antique. But it will still serve for my purposes. This book is doubtless very well known to you; I can't undertake to tell you much about it, especially as it has often been regarded as standing in an unusually close relation to a body of philosophy which I am incompetent to expound. Perhaps you will be charitable if I explain that I shall be using it and other works of Sartre merely as examples. What I have to do is simply to show that La Nausée represents, in the work of one extremely important and representative figure, a kind of crisis in the relation between fiction and reality, the tension or dissonance between paradigmatic form and contingent reality. That the mood of Sartre has so ~ Frank Kermode

Always be ready for criticism for there shall always be people who shall be ready always to criticize you. The positive lesson you learn from your critics, is the most important thing which matter and not just the matter! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Earlier in [2007] the [Prime Minister's Office] had also drawn criticism for trying to muzzle the judiciary. The reproach came from Antonio Lamer, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court ... 'I must say I was taken aback,' said Lamer, who sat on the Supreme Court for twenty years. 'The prime minister is going the wrong route as regards the independence of the judiciary. He's trying to interfere with the sentencing process. ~ Lawrence Martin

Let us finally consider how naive it is altogether to say: "Man ought to be such and such!" Reality shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the abundance of a lavish play and change of forms - and some wretched loafer of a moralist comments: "No! Man ought to be different." He even knows what man should be like, this wretched bigot and prig: he paints himself on the wall and comments, "Ecce homo!" But even when the moralist addresses himself only to the single human being and says to him, "You ought to be such and such!" he does not cease to make himself ridiculous. The single human being is a piece of fatum from the front and from the rear, one law more, one necessity more for all that is yet to come and to be. To say to him, "Change yourself!" is to demand that everything be changed, even retroactively. And indeed there have been consistent moralists who wanted man to be different, that is, virtuous - they wanted him remade in their own image, as a prig: to that end, they negated the world! No small madness! No modest kind of immodesty!
Morality, insofar as it condemns for its own sake, and not out of regard for the concerns, considerations, and contrivances of life, is a specific error with which one ought to have no pity - an idiosyncrasy of degenerates which has caused immeasurable harm.
We others, we immoralists, have, conversely, made room in our hearts for every kind of understanding, comprehending, and approving. We do not easily negate; we make it a ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Popular and unpopular don't necessarily map to shit and shinola, of course. ~ Hal Duncan

I need a little criticism while I make a record so that I kind of feel like: okay, I know that I'm doing the best that I can do because someone is actually here challenging it. ~ Benji Madden

Bad criticism has followed things like comic books or TV, and they put down a medium. A medium cannot be inherently good or bad. ~ Corey Stoll

O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery. ~ Virginia Woolf

People who look at art don't really - don't go with the artist. They don't sort of accept what he or she has done and kind of go with it. There are always - either there's too much color or not enough color, either it's not conceptual enough or it's too conceptual. In other words, most criticism isn't what the viewer expected that it would do based on what they think you have done and that's good as far as I'm concerned. ~ Robert Barry

The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up. ~ Victor Hugo

Novels, says Sartre, are not life, but they owe our power upon us, as upon himself as an infant, to the fact that they are somehow like life. In life, he once remarked, 'all ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So we try to change the world; that is, to live as if the relations between things and their potentialities were governed not by deterministic processes but by magic.' The as if of the novel consists in a similar negation of determinism, the establishment of an accepted freedom by magic. We make up aventures, invent and ascribe the significance of temporal concords to those 'privileged moments' to which we alone award their prestige, make our own human clocks tick in a clockless world. And we take a man who is by definition de trop, and create a context in which he isn't.

The novel is a lie only as our quotidian inventions are lies. The power which goes to its making--the imagination --is a function of man's inescapable freedom. This freedom, in Mary Warnock's words, 'expresses itself in his ability to see things which are not.' It is by his fiction that we know he is free. It is not surprising that Sartre as ontologist, having to describe many kinds of fictive behaviour, invents stories to do so, thus moving into a middle ground between life and novel. .... ~ Frank Kermode

When people criticise you, you've got to listen to that criticism, and to learn from it, which I've tried to do. ~ Gordon Brown