Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

- Chandler, Raymond

Best Quotes about Criticism

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

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

Byron, Lord

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Rayburn, Sam

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

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

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

10.

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

Mascotte, John P.

11.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Nunn, Gregory

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

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

19.

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

Moliere

20.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

21.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

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.

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

24.

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

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

26.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

27.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Paz, Octavio

28.

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.

29.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

30.

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

James, Clive

31.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

32.

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

33.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

34.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La

35.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

36.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

37.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

38.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

46.

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

Steinbeck, John

47.

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

Johnson, Samuel

48.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

49.

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