Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

- Addison, Joseph

Best Quotes about Criticism

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Hubbard, Elbert

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

10.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

11.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

12.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

13.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

14.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

15.

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

18.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

19.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

20.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

21.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

22.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

23.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

24.

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

25.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

26.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

27.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

28.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

29.

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

Williams, Bern

30.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

31.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

32.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Johnson, Samuel

33.

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

34.

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

35.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

36.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

37.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

38.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

39.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

40.

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb

42.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Beecher, Henry Ward

44.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

45.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

46.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

47.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

48.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

49.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

50.

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer