Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

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

Cioran, E. M.

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

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

France, Anatole

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

10.

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

Kael, Pauline

11.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

12.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

13.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La

14.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

15.

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

16.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

17.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

18.

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

Hampton, Christopher

19.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

20.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

21.

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

22.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

23.

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

Epictetus

24.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

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

26.

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

Conrad, Joseph

27.

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

28.

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

Briton, Crand

29.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Rostand, Jean

31.

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

32.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

33.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

34.

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

35.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

36.

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.

37.

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

Churchill, Charles

38.

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

39.

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

Bible

40.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

41.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

Shenstone, William

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

47.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

48.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

49.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

50.

They condemn what they do not understand.