Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Raphael, Frederic

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

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

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

Moliere

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

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

10.

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

Buxton, Charles

11.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest

12.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

13.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

14.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

15.

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

Sontag, Susan

16.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

17.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

18.

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

Turner, Ted

19.

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

20.

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

Murdoch, Iris

21.

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

Fuller, Margaret

22.

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb

23.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

24.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

25.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

26.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

27.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

28.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

29.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

30.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

31.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

36.

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.

37.

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

Mascotte, John P.

38.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

40.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

41.

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

42.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Holtz, Lou

46.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

48.

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.

49.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

50.

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