Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Proverb, Chinese

Best Quotes about Criticism

A friend is a lot of things, but a critic isn't.

Williams, Bern

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

Richard Pryor

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

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

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

Clurman, Harold

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

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

Conrad, Joseph

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Cioran, E. M.

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

10.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

11.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

12.

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

13.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

14.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

15.

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

Smith, Sydney

16.

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

17.

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

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

19.

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

20.

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

Elbert Hubbard

21.

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

Kael, Pauline

22.

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

23.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt

24.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

25.

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

Christopher Hampton

26.

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

Steinbeck, John

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Little, Lynn M.

30.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

31.

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

Dale Carnegie

32.

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

33.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

34.

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

Hampton, Christopher

35.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

36.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

37.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

38.

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

39.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

40.

Most of us are umpires at heart; we like to call balls and strikes on somebody else.

Aikman, Leo

41.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

42.

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

43.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

44.

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

45.

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

Kundera, Milan

46.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

47.

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.

48.

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

49.

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

50.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott