Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Franklin P. Jones

Best Quotes about Criticism

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 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

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.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

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

James, Clive

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Cocteau, Jean

10.

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

11.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

12.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

13.

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

Lowell, James Russell

14.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

15.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

16.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.

Little, Lynn M.

18.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

19.

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

Wilde, Oscar

20.

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

Rayburn, Sam

21.

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

Briton, Crand

22.

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

Steinbeck, John

23.

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

24.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

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

Franklin P. Jones

26.

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

27.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

32.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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.

36.

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

Pollock, Channing

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Holtz, Lou

40.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

41.

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

Sontag, Susan

42.

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

43.

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

Porchia, Antonio

44.

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

Shenstone, William

45.

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

46.

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

47.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

48.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

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

50.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord