Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Buxton, Charles

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Conrad, Joseph

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

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

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

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

Williams, Bern

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

Little, Lynn M.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

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

Steinbeck, John

10.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

11.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

12.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Aikman, Leo

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

20.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

21.

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

Lowell, James Russell

22.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

23.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

24.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

25.

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

26.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

27.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

28.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

29.

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

30.

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

Buxton, Charles

31.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

32.

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

33.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Aragon, Louis

34.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

35.

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

Jean Sibelius

36.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

37.

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

Murdoch, Iris

38.

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

Byron, Lord

39.

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

Kundera, Milan

40.

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

Clurman, Harold

41.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

43.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

44.

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

45.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

47.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

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

Wilde, Oscar

49.

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

50.

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

Cocteau, Jean