Motivational Quotes

Criticism

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

- Cartwright, Bill

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

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.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

Buxton, Charles

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

10.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

11.

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

Nunn, Gregory

12.

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

Buxton, Charles

13.

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

Ziglar, Zig

14.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

18.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

19.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

20.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

21.

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

Churchill, Charles

22.

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

Clurman, Harold

23.

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

24.

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

Little, Lynn M.

25.

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

Cocteau, Jean

26.

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

27.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

28.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

29.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

30.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

31.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

32.

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

Porchia, Antonio

33.

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

Lowell, James Russell

34.

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

35.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Eliot, T. S.

36.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

37.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

38.

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

Rayburn, Sam

39.

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

Elbert Hubbard

40.

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

41.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

42.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

43.

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

Wilde, Oscar

44.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

45.

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

46.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

47.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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