Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Epictetus

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Murdoch, Iris

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Miller, Henry

10.

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

Franklin P. Jones

11.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

12.

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

13.

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

Holtz, Lou

14.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

15.

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.

16.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

17.

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

18.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

21.

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

Churchill, Charles

22.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Native American Proverb

26.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

27.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

28.

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

Rayburn, Sam

29.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

30.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

Wilde, Oscar

35.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

36.

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

Hill, Napoleon

37.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

38.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

39.

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

40.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

41.

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

Lowell, James Russell

42.

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

Little, Lynn M.

43.

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.

44.

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

Paz, Octavio

45.

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

46.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

47.

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

48.

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

Turner, Ted

49.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

50.

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

Kundera, Milan