Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

- Burns, Robert

Best Quotes about Criticism

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

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

Franklin P. Jones

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

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

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

Elbert Hubbard

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.

Little, Lynn M.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

10.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

11.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

12.

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

13.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

14.

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

15.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

16.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

17.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

18.

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory

19.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

20.

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.

21.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

22.

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

Murdoch, Iris

23.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

24.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

26.

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

27.

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

Turner, Ted

28.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

29.

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

30.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

31.

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

Byron, Lord

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

36.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

37.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

38.

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

39.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

40.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

41.

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

Hoffman, Dustin

42.

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

Churchill, Charles

43.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Guinon, Albert

48.

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

Harold Rosenberg

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.

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

Johnson, Samuel