Quotes Tagged "criticism"

I do this to the best of my ability and the critics criticize me critically but it's the mental mixed with spirituality. Thinking myself a higher being, knowing myself as a supreme. God chose this for me from the beginning and if there's anyone that has a problem with that, take it up with God and He'll put it to an ending. My protector forever always defending, it's the gift of Heaven He keeps sending.

To many intellectuals such as Celsus, the whole idea of a ‘Creation myth’ was not only implausible but redundant. During this period in Rome, a popular and influential philosophical theory offered an alternative view. This theory – an Epicurean one – stated that everything in the world was made not by any divine being but by the collision and combination of atoms. According to this school of thought, these particles were invisible to the naked eye but they had their own structure and could not be cut (temno) into any smaller particles: they were a-temnos – ‘the uncuttable thing’: the atom. Everything that you see or feel, these materialists argued, was made up of two things: atoms and space ‘in which these bodies are and through which they move this way and that’. Even living creatures were made from them: humans were, as one (hostile) author summarized, not made by God but were instead nothing more than ‘a haphazard union of elements’. The distinct species of animals were explained by a form of proto-Darwinism. As the Roman poet and atomist Lucretius wrote, nature put forth many species. Those that had useful characteristics – the fox and its cunning, say, or the dog and its intelligence – survived, thrived and reproduced. Those creatures that lacked these ‘lay at the mercy of others for prey and profit . . . until nature brought that race to destruction’.

I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

Criticism demands infinitely more culture than artistic creation.

The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.

نحن لا يمكن أن نجبر فناناً على أن يعمل بخلاف ما تمليه عليه طبيعته وإلا كنا نجبره على التصنع والتكلف، وهذا شر لا يمكن أن يؤذي الأدب والفن، والمسألة في غاية البساطة مع ذلك، فإذا كنا نتيح للفنان حريته كاملة، فنحن أيضاً أحرار في تقييمنا للأعمال الفنية، فلا نمنح تقديرنا إلا لمن يقدم لنا العمل الفني الكامل، وهو العمل الفني الرفيع فنياً النافع إنسانياً واجتماعياً

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

An author’s great day is releasing your book into the world like a butterfly and having a reviewer come upon it and say…oh, that’s lovely!

A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.

I find that it is when an opinion is least wanted, that it is most needed.

And, in the end, what will the students have learned? They will, to be sure, have learned something about whales, perhaps about navigation and map reading, most of which they could have learned just as well by other means. Mainly, they will have learned that learning is a form of entertainment or, more precisely, that anything worth learning can take the form of an entertainment, and ought to.

When you judge another, you judge a child of God, and when you condemn another, you condemn your Heavenly Father.

The final proof of greatness lies in being able to endure criticism without resentment.

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

I think a lot of accusations about me are inaccurate, but to call me a xenophobe is an accurate criticism.

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance or a stranger.

Whenever a political regime or religious establishment refuses to tolerate criticism, it advertises itself as repressive, backward, and insecure.

Barack Obama happens to be the first African-American, and so criticism of him is and always was gonna be racism, and therefore not permitted.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.