Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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.

Best Quotes about Criticism

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

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

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

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

Hoffman, Dustin

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

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

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

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

Hampton, Christopher

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

11.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

12.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Richard Pryor

16.

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

Turner, Ted

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Kael, Pauline

19.

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

20.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

21.

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

22.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

23.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

24.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

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

26.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

31.

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Hubbard, Elbert

32.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

33.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

34.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

35.

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

36.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

37.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

38.

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

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.

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.

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

43.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

44.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

45.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

46.

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

47.

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

48.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

49.

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

50.

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

Mcclung, Nellie