Motivational Quotes

Criticism

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

- Congreve, William

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Mizner, Wilson

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

Buxton, Charles

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

Pollock, Channing

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

Dale Carnegie

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

Moliere

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

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.

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

Clurman, Harold

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

10.

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

Collins, Jackie

11.

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

12.

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

13.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

15.

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

Shenstone, William

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.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

18.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

19.

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

20.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

21.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

22.

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

23.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

24.

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

25.

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

Williams, Bern

26.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

27.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

28.

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

29.

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

Little, Lynn M.

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

Jean Sibelius

33.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

34.

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

Flagg, Fannie

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.

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

37.

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

Ziglar, Zig

38.

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

39.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

40.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

41.

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

42.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

43.

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

Burns, Robert

44.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

45.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

46.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

47.

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella

48.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

49.

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

50.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney