Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Blame is safer than praise.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Proverb, Chinese

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

Pope, Alexander

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

Hill, Napoleon

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.

Shenstone, William

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

Cioran, E. M.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

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

10.

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

Briton, Crand

11.

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

Kael, Pauline

12.

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.

Aikman, Leo

13.

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

14.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Miller, Henry

18.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

19.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

20.

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

Lowell, James Russell

21.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

22.

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

Guinon, Albert

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

26.

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

27.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

28.

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

Raphael, Frederic

29.

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

Johnson, Samuel

30.

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Miller, Henry

31.

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

32.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

33.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

34.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

36.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

37.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

38.

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

Native American Proverb

39.

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

Collins, Jackie

40.

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.

41.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

42.

Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.

Pollock, Channing

43.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

44.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

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

Mascotte, John P.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

50.

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