Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Baudrillard, Jean

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

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

Paz, Octavio

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

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

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

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

Rostand, Jean

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

James, Henry

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

10.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

11.

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

12.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

13.

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.

14.

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

Buxton, Charles

15.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

16.

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

Shenstone, William

17.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Collins, Jackie

19.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

20.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

21.

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

22.

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

23.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

24.

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

25.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

26.

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

27.

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

Burns, Robert

28.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Aragon, Louis

29.

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

Proverb, Chinese

30.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

31.

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

Hill, Napoleon

32.

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

33.

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

France, Anatole

34.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

35.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

36.

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

Johnson, Samuel

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

39.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

40.

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.

41.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

42.

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

43.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

44.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

45.

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

Nunn, Gregory

46.

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

Native American Proverb

47.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

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.

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

50.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.