Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Disraeli, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

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

Hubbard, Elbert

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

Mascotte, John P.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

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

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

Steinbeck, John

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

10.

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

Buxton, Charles

11.

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

Murdoch, Iris

12.

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

Aikman, Leo

13.

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

14.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

15.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

16.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

17.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

18.

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

Little, Lynn M.

19.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way.

Miller, Henry

22.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

24.

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

Ziglar, Zig

25.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

29.

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

Bible

30.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

31.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

32.

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

33.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

Collins, Jackie

37.

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.

38.

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

Williams, Bern

39.

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney

40.

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

Jean Sibelius

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

James, Clive

44.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

45.

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

Elbert Hubbard

46.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

47.

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

Hugo, Victor

48.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

49.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

50.

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

Lowell, James Russell