Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

- Proverb, German

Best Quotes about Criticism

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

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

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

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

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

Hill, Napoleon

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

Williams, Bern

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

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

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

10.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

11.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

14.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

15.

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

Collins, Jackie

16.

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

17.

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

Clurman, Harold

18.

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

Proverb, Chinese

19.

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

Turner, Ted

20.

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

Byron, Lord

21.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

22.

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

23.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

25.

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

26.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

28.

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

Steinbeck, John

29.

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

Dale Carnegie

30.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

34.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

35.

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

Buxton, Charles

36.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

37.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

38.

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

39.

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

Murdoch, Iris

40.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

41.

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.

42.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

43.

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

Shenstone, William

44.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

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.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

47.

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.

48.

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

Elbert Hubbard

49.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

50.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest