Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Nunn, Gregory

Best Quotes about Criticism

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.

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney

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

Native American Proverb

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

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

10.

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

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.

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

13.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

15.

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

16.

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

Paz, Octavio

17.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

18.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

22.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

23.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

28.

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.

29.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

30.

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

Hugo, Victor

31.

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

France, Anatole

32.

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

33.

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

Little, Lynn M.

34.

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

Dale Carnegie

35.

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

Rayburn, Sam

36.

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

Clurman, Harold

37.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

38.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

39.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

40.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

41.

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

42.

Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.

Pollock, Channing

43.

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

Collins, Jackie

44.

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

45.

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

46.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John

47.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

48.

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

49.

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

Turner, Ted

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