Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Franklin P. Jones

Best Quotes about Criticism

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

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

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

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

Cocteau, Jean

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

Pope, Alexander

13.

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

14.

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

Guinon, Albert

15.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

16.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

17.

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

18.

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

Kundera, Milan

19.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

20.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

21.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

22.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

23.

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

24.

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

25.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

26.

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

27.

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

Henry Fielding

28.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La

29.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

30.

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

Lowell, James Russell

31.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

32.

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

33.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

35.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

36.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

37.

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

Aikman, Leo

38.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

39.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

40.

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

41.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Aragon, Louis

42.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

43.

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

44.

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

Steinbeck, John

45.

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.

46.

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

Rostand, Jean

47.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

48.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

49.

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

50.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel