Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

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

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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

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

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

Holtz, Lou

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

Pope, Alexander

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

Guinon, Albert

10.

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

11.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

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.

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

17.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

18.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

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

20.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

21.

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

22.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

24.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

25.

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

Costello, Elvis

26.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

27.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

30.

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

31.

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

Murdoch, Iris

32.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

33.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

34.

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

Fielding, Henry

35.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

36.

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

37.

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

Nunn, Gregory

38.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

39.

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.

40.

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

Lowell, James Russell

41.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

42.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

44.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

45.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

46.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

47.

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

Kundera, Milan

48.

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

Clurman, Harold

49.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

50.

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