Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Lowell, James Russell

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Little, Lynn M.

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.

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

Kundera, Milan

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

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

Byron, Lord

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

Jones, Franklin P.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

10.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

11.

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

Cocteau, Jean

12.

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

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Rayburn, Sam

15.

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

16.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Fielding, Henry

18.

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

19.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

20.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

21.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

22.

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

23.

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

Shenstone, William

24.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

25.

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

Elbert Hubbard

26.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Eliot, T. S.

27.

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

Richard Pryor

28.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

29.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

31.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

32.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

33.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

34.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Lowell, James Russell

39.

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.

40.

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.

41.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

42.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

43.

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.

44.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

45.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

46.

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

47.

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

48.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

49.

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

Ziglar, Zig

50.

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella