Motivational Quotes

Criticism

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

- Miller, Henry

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Bible

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

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

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

Gourmont, Remy De

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

Fuller, Margaret

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

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

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

10.

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

Johnson, Samuel

11.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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

13.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

14.

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

15.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

16.

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

Holtz, Lou

17.

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Buxton, Charles

18.

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

19.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

20.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

21.

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

Flagg, Fannie

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

26.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

27.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

28.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Paz, Octavio

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

Shenstone, William

31.

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

Byron, Lord

32.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

33.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

34.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

35.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

36.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

37.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

38.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

39.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

40.

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.

41.

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

Hampton, Christopher

42.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

43.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

44.

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

45.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

46.

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

Porchia, Antonio

47.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

48.

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

Rostand, Jean

49.

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

Hill, Napoleon

50.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Frye, Northrop