The puzzle of critics.
Critics all are ready made. [ Byron ]
Critics are like brushes of noblemen's clothes. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Children have more need of models than of critics. [ Joubert ]
Critics on verse, as squibs on triumphs wait.
Proclaim their glory, and augment the state;
Hot, envious, noisy, proud, the scribbling fry
Burn, hiss, and bounce, waste paper, ink, and die. [ Young ]
Critics are men who have failed in literature and art. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it. [ Macaulay ]
Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews to challenge every new author. [ Longfellow ]
When my time on Earth is gone, and my activities here are past, I want that they should bury me upside down, so my critics can kiss my ass. [ Bobby Knight ]
Critics must excuse me if I compare them to certain animals called asses, who, by gnawing vines, originally taught the great advantage of pruning them. [ Shenstone ]
With vivid words your just conceptions grace. Much truth compressing in a narrow space; Then many shall peruse, but few complain, And envy frown, and critics snarl in vain. [ Pindar ]
What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say, for two thousand years. And then? Why, then, a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for eternity: not the meagre rhetorical eternity of the periodical critics, but for the real eternity, wherein dwelleth the Divine. [ Carlyle ]
Those critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analyzed the laws of aesthetic beauty concur in maintaining that the real truthfulness of all works of imagination - sculpture, painting, written fiction - is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent the positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
The drama is not a mere copy of nature, not a facsimile. It is the free running hand of genius, under the impression of its liveliest wit or most passionate impulses, a thousand times adorning or feeling all as it goes; and you must read it, as the healthy instinct of audiences almost always does, if the critics will let them alone, with a grain of allowance, and a tendency to go away with as much of it for use as is necessary, and the rest for the luxury of laughter, pity, or poetical admiration. [ Leigh Hunt ]
I smoke in bed until I have to go to sleep; I wake up in the night, sometimes once, sometimes twice; sometimes three times, and I never waste any of these opportunities to smoke. This habit is so old and dear and precious to me that I would feel as you, sir, would feel if you should lose the only moral you've got - meaning the chairman - if you've got one: I am making no charges: I will grant, here, that I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]