Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

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

Flagg, Fannie

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

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Briton, Crand

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

Clurman, Harold

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

10.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

11.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

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

Churchill, Charles

13.

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

Burns, Robert

14.

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

Turner, Ted

15.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

16.

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

Collins, Jackie

17.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

18.

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

Hugo, Victor

19.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

20.

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

21.

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth

22.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

23.

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

24.

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

Sontag, Susan

25.

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

Williams, Bern

26.

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.

27.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

28.

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

Lowell, James Russell

29.

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

30.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

31.

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

32.

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

Richard Pryor

33.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

34.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

35.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

36.

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

Johnson, Samuel

37.

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

Franklin P. Jones

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Kael, Pauline

44.

No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

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

46.

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

Buxton, Charles

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.

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

49.

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

Paz, Octavio

50.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson