Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Cocteau, Jean

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Mascotte, John P.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

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

Elbert Hubbard

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Native American Proverb

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

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

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

10.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

11.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

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

Paz, Octavio

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

16.

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.

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

19.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Frye, Northrop

20.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Eliot, T. S.

21.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

22.

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

Hampton, Christopher

23.

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

24.

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

Franklin P. Jones

25.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John

26.

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

Byron, Lord

27.

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

28.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

29.

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

Guinon, Albert

30.

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

31.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

32.

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

33.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

34.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

35.

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

Buxton, Charles

36.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

37.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

38.

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

Dale Carnegie

39.

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

Rostand, Jean

40.

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

Nunn, Gregory

41.

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

Mizner, Wilson

42.

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.

43.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

44.

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

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.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

47.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

48.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

49.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

50.

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