Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Byron, Lord

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Aikman, Leo

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

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

Bible

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

10.

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

11.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

12.

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

Churchill, Charles

13.

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

14.

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

Steinbeck, John

15.

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.

16.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

17.

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

18.

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

19.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

20.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

21.

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

Fuller, Margaret

22.

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

23.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

24.

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

25.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

26.

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

27.

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

Kundera, Milan

28.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

29.

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

Lowell, James Russell

30.

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

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.

Pollock, Channing

33.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

34.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

35.

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

36.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

37.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

38.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

39.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Kurt Vonnegut

40.

Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.

Mascotte, John P.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

44.

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

45.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

46.

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

47.

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

France, Anatole

48.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

49.

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

50.

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