Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

- Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Steinbeck, John

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

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.

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

Proverb, Chinese

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

10.

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

Cioran, E. M.

11.

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

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

Aikman, Leo

17.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

18.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

22.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

23.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Beecher, Henry Ward

24.

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

Ziglar, Zig

25.

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

Epictetus

26.

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn't make your house look any better.

Holtz, Lou

27.

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

Richard Pryor

28.

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

Clurman, Harold

29.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

30.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

31.

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

Kundera, Milan

32.

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

Paz, Octavio

33.

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

Franklin P. Jones

34.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

35.

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.

36.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

37.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

38.

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

39.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Johnson, Samuel

43.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

47.

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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