Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Native American Proverb

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

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

Kael, Pauline

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

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

Mcclung, Nellie

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

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

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

Little, Lynn M.

10.

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.

11.

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

Richard Pryor

12.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

13.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

14.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

15.

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

Nunn, Gregory

16.

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

Fuller, Margaret

17.

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.

18.

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

Hugo, Victor

19.

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

20.

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Hemingway, Ernest

21.

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

Bible

22.

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.

23.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

25.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

26.

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

27.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

28.

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

Rayburn, Sam

29.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

30.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

31.

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

32.

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

Guinon, Albert

33.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

Steinbeck, John

37.

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

Byron, Lord

38.

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

Hampton, Christopher

39.

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

40.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

41.

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

Johnson, Samuel

42.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

43.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Let me walk three weeks in the footsteps of my enemy, carry the same burden, have the same trials as he, before I say one word to criticize.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

50.

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

Benjamin Disraeli