Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Rayburn, Sam

Best Quotes about Criticism

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Paz, Octavio

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

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

Mcclung, Nellie

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Hampton, Christopher

13.

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

Little, Lynn M.

14.

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

Aikman, Leo

15.

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

16.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

17.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

18.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

22.

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

23.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

24.

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

Elbert Hubbard

25.

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

26.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

27.

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

Buxton, Charles

28.

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

Moliere

29.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Steinbeck, John

33.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

34.

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

35.

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

Richard Pryor

36.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

38.

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

James, Clive

39.

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

40.

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

Turner, Ted

41.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

42.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

43.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

48.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

49.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

50.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.