Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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.

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Criticism

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

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

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

Native American Proverb

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

Turner, Ted

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

Franklin P. Jones

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

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

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

10.

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

James, Clive

11.

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

12.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

14.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

15.

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

Sontag, Susan

16.

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

France, Anatole

17.

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

Mizner, Wilson

18.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

19.

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

20.

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

Benjamin, Walter

21.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

22.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

23.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

24.

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

25.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

26.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

27.

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

Cioran, E. M.

28.

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

Epictetus

29.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

30.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

31.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

32.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

36.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

37.

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.

38.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

39.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

40.

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

Rostand, Jean

41.

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

42.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

43.

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

44.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

45.

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

46.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

47.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

48.

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.

49.

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

Proverb, Chinese

50.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia