Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

- Rostand, Jean

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

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

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

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

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

Bible

10.

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

11.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

12.

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

Elbert Hubbard

13.

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

Collins, Jackie

14.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

15.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

16.

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.

17.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

18.

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

France, Anatole

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

22.

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

23.

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

24.

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

Conrad, Joseph

25.

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

26.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

27.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger.

Franklin P. Jones

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.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

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

Steinbeck, John

34.

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

Hill, Napoleon

35.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

36.

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

37.

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

Moliere

38.

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

39.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

40.

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

41.

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

Aikman, Leo

42.

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

Williams, Bern

43.

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

44.

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

Kael, Pauline

45.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

46.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

48.

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

Native American Proverb

49.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

50.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan