Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Carruthers, Charles Edwin

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt

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

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

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

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

Williams, Bern

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

Shenstone, William

10.

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

11.

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

12.

No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

14.

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

Dale Carnegie

15.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

16.

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

Byron, Lord

17.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

18.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

19.

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

20.

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

Harold Rosenberg

21.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

22.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

23.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

24.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

25.

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

26.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Cocteau, Jean

27.

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

28.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

29.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

30.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

31.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

32.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

33.

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn't make your house look any better.

Holtz, Lou

34.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

35.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Clurman, Harold

37.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

38.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

39.

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

Little, Lynn M.

40.

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

41.

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

Kundera, Milan

42.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

43.

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

Buxton, Charles

44.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

45.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Johnson, Samuel

49.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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.