Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Disraeli, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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.

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

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

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

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

Aikman, Leo

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

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

Pollock, Channing

10.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

11.

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

12.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

13.

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

Little, Lynn M.

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.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Harold Rosenberg

19.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

20.

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

Byron, Lord

21.

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

Moliere

22.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

23.

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

James, Clive

24.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

28.

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

Wilde, Oscar

29.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Burns, Robert

33.

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

Shenstone, William

34.

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

35.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

36.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

37.

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

Holtz, Lou

38.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

39.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

40.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

41.

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

Dale Carnegie

42.

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

43.

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

Mascotte, John P.

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

47.

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

48.

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

Ziglar, Zig

49.

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

Churchill, Charles

50.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord