Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

- Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Best Quotes about Criticism

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Johnson, Samuel

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

Paz, Octavio

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Cocteau, Jean

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

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

10.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

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

Moliere

12.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Benjamin, Walter

13.

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

14.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

15.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

16.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

20.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

21.

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

Rostand, Jean

22.

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

Elbert Hubbard

23.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

24.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Buxton, Charles

30.

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

31.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

32.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

33.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

34.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

36.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

37.

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

Aikman, Leo

38.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

39.

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

40.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

41.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

42.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

43.

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

Steinbeck, John

44.

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

45.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

46.

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

Proverb, Chinese

47.

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

Hill, Napoleon

48.

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

49.

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

50.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus