Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Holtz, Lou

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

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

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

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

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

Raphael, Frederic

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

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

Dale Carnegie

10.

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

11.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

12.

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.

13.

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

Steinbeck, John

14.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

15.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

16.

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

17.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

18.

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

West, Rebecca

19.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

20.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

21.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

22.

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

Proverb, Chinese

23.

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

Updike, John

24.

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

25.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

26.

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

27.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

28.

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

29.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

30.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

31.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Johnson, Samuel

38.

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

Cocteau, Jean

39.

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

Collins, Jackie

40.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

41.

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

Kael, Pauline

42.

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

Paz, Octavio

43.

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney

45.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

46.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

47.

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