Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Disraeli, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Criticism

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Little, Lynn M.

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

Costello, Elvis

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

Johnson, Samuel

10.

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

11.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

12.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

13.

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.

14.

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

Jean Sibelius

15.

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

16.

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

Native American Proverb

17.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

18.

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

19.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

20.

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.

21.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Churchill, Charles

25.

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

Kundera, Milan

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

28.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Cioran, E. M.

33.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Beecher, Henry Ward

34.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

35.

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.

36.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George

37.

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

Ziglar, Zig

38.

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

39.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

40.

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

41.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

42.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

43.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

44.

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

Harold Rosenberg

45.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

46.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

47.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

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.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

50.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.