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

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Mizner, Wilson

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

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

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

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

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

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

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

Benjamin Disraeli

10.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

11.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

12.

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

13.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Paz, Octavio

14.

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

15.

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

Elbert Hubbard

16.

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

17.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

21.

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

22.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

23.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

24.

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

Mascotte, John P.

25.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

26.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

27.

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

Ziglar, Zig

28.

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.

29.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

30.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

31.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

32.

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

33.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

34.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

35.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

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.

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.

38.

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

Kael, Pauline

39.

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

Harold Rosenberg

40.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Eliot, T. S.

41.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

42.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

43.

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

44.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

45.

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

Costello, Elvis

46.

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

47.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

48.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

49.

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

50.

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