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

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Lowell, James Russell

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

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

Holtz, Lou

10.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

13.

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

14.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

15.

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

16.

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

Costello, Elvis

17.

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

18.

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

Cocteau, Jean

19.

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

20.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

21.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

22.

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

23.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

24.

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.

25.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

26.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

27.

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

28.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

29.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

30.

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.

31.

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

Proverb, Chinese

32.

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

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

35.

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

Churchill, Charles

36.

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

Steinbeck, John

37.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

38.

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

Williams, Bern

39.

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

Clurman, Harold

40.

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.

41.

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

Updike, John

42.

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.

43.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

44.

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

45.

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

Shenstone, William

46.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

47.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

48.

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

Franklin P. Jones

49.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

50.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry