Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Dale Carnegie

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

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

Mizner, Wilson

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

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

Rayburn, Sam

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

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

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

10.

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

Nunn, Gregory

11.

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

12.

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

13.

You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

Whistler, James Mcneill

14.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

15.

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

16.

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

Mascotte, John P.

17.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

18.

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

19.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

20.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

21.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

22.

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

Clurman, Harold

23.

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

24.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

25.

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

Churchill, Charles

26.

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

Cocteau, Jean

27.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

28.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

29.

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

30.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

31.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

32.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

33.

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

Moliere

34.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

35.

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

Kael, Pauline

36.

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

Lowell, James Russell

37.

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

38.

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

Turner, Ted

39.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

40.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

41.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

42.

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

Guinon, Albert

43.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

44.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

45.

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.

46.

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

Steinbeck, John

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Raphael, Frederic

50.

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