Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

Jean Sibelius

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.

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

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

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

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

Ziglar, Zig

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

10.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

11.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

12.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

13.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

14.

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

Pollock, Channing

15.

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

16.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

18.

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

19.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

20.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

21.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

22.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

23.

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

James, Clive

24.

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

Mascotte, John P.

25.

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

26.

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

27.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

28.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

29.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

30.

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

31.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

32.

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

33.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

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

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.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

37.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

41.

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

42.

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

43.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

44.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

45.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

46.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

47.

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

Byron, Lord

48.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

49.

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Buxton, Charles

50.

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor