Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Disraeli, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

France, Anatole

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

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

Aikman, Leo

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

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

Cocteau, Jean

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

10.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

11.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Mascotte, John P.

13.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

14.

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

Moliere

15.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

16.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

17.

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

Byron, Lord

18.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

19.

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

20.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

21.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

22.

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb

23.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

25.

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

Guinon, Albert

26.

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

27.

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

Collins, Jackie

28.

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

29.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

30.

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

31.

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

Pope, Alexander

32.

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

Clurman, Harold

33.

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

Kundera, Milan

34.

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

Lowell, James Russell

35.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

36.

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

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

41.

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

Bible

42.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

43.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

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.

You're never s good as everyone tells you when you win, and you're never as bad as they say when you lose.

Holtz, Lou

46.

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

Kael, Pauline

47.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

48.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

49.

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

50.

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