Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.

- Aikman, Leo

Best Quotes about Criticism

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

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

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert

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

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

Williams, Bern

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

Churchill, Charles

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

Porchia, Antonio

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Kurt Vonnegut

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

10.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

11.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

12.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

13.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

14.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

15.

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

16.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

17.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

18.

Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.

Pollock, Channing

19.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

20.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

21.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

22.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

23.

A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.

Shenstone, William

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.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

26.

Let me walk three weeks in the footsteps of my enemy, carry the same burden, have the same trials as he, before I say one word to criticize.

27.

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

28.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

29.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

30.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

31.

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.

32.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Schlegel, Friedrich

33.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

34.

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

35.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

36.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

37.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

39.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

40.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

41.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

43.

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

44.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

45.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

46.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

47.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

48.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

49.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

50.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John