Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Franklin P. Jones

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

Buxton, Charles

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

Bible

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.

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

Hugo, Victor

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

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

Mascotte, John P.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

10.

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

11.

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

Byron, Lord

12.

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

13.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

14.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

15.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

16.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

17.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

20.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

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

22.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

23.

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

24.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

25.

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

26.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

27.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

28.

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

Aikman, Leo

29.

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

30.

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

Sontag, Susan

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

33.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

37.

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

38.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

39.

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

Burns, Robert

40.

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

France, Anatole

41.

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

Clurman, Harold

42.

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

43.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

Erasmus, Desiderius

44.

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

45.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

46.

No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Frye, Northrop

48.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

49.

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

50.

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

Porchia, Antonio