Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

- Fox, Dr. Emmit

Best Quotes about Criticism

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

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

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

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

James, Henry

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.

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

Johnson, Samuel

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

Nunn, Gregory

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

10.

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

Kael, Pauline

11.

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

Proverb, Chinese

12.

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

13.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

14.

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

15.

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

16.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

17.

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

Cioran, E. M.

18.

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

19.

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

20.

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

Little, Lynn M.

21.

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

22.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

23.

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.

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.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

26.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

30.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

31.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

32.

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

33.

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

34.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

35.

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

Lowell, James Russell

36.

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

37.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

38.

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

Kundera, Milan

39.

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

Sontag, Susan

40.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

41.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

42.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

43.

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

Hill, Napoleon

44.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

45.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

46.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

50.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton