Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

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

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

Hill, Napoleon

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

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

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney

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

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

10.

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

11.

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

Hugo, Victor

12.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Cioran, E. M.

13.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

14.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

15.

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

Johnson, Samuel

16.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

17.

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

18.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

19.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

20.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

21.

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

22.

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

23.

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth

24.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

25.

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

Sontag, Susan

26.

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

27.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

28.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

29.

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

30.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

31.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

32.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

33.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

34.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

35.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

36.

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

Pollock, Channing

37.

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

38.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Buxton, Charles

42.

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.

43.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

44.

Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.

Mascotte, John P.

45.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

46.

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

47.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

48.

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.

49.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

50.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De