Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Holtz, Lou

Best Quotes about Criticism

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Native American Proverb

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

Briton, Crand

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

Franklin P. Jones

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

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

Updike, John

10.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

11.

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

12.

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

Churchill, Charles

13.

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

14.

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

Cocteau, Jean

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Steinbeck, John

19.

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

Hill, Napoleon

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

23.

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

Rayburn, Sam

24.

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

25.

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

Guinon, Albert

26.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

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 comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

29.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

30.

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

31.

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.

32.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

33.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

34.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

35.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

36.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

37.

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

38.

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

Williams, Bern

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Shenstone, William

42.

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

43.

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney

44.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

Steinbeck, John

46.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

47.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

48.

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

49.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

50.

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