Motivational Quotes

Criticism

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

- Maugham, W. Somerset

Best Quotes about Criticism

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

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

Guinon, Albert

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

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

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

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

Elbert Hubbard

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

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

Cocteau, Jean

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

10.

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

Buxton, Charles

11.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

12.

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.

13.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Schlegel, Friedrich

14.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

15.

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

Johnson, Samuel

16.

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

Pope, Alexander

17.

You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

Whistler, James Mcneill

18.

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

Proverb, Chinese

19.

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

Flagg, Fannie

20.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

21.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

22.

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

Christopher Hampton

23.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

24.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

25.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

30.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

31.

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

Nunn, Gregory

32.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

33.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

34.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

35.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

36.

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

Hampton, Christopher

37.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

38.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

39.

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

Byron, Lord

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

44.

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

Dale Carnegie

45.

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

46.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

47.

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.

48.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

49.

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

James, Henry

50.

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