Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Criticism

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

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

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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

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

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

James, Clive

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

Nunn, Gregory

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

10.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

11.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

12.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

13.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

14.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Porchia, Antonio

18.

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.

19.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

20.

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

Holtz, Lou

21.

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

Buxton, Charles

22.

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

Ziglar, Zig

23.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

24.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

25.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

26.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

27.

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

28.

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

Byron, Lord

29.

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

30.

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

Native American Proverb

31.

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

Bible

32.

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

33.

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

Benjamin, Walter

34.

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

36.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

37.

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

38.

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

Williams, Bern

39.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

40.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

41.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

42.

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

Briton, Crand

43.

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

Johnson, Samuel

44.

To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Elbert Hubbard

45.

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

46.

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert

47.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

48.

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

49.

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

Churchill, Charles

50.

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

Murdoch, Iris