Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Erasmus, Desiderius

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Fuller, Margaret

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

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

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

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

Williams, Bern

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

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

Jones, Franklin P.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

10.

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

11.

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

12.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

13.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

14.

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

15.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

16.

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

James, Clive

17.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

18.

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

19.

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

20.

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

Mizner, Wilson

21.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

22.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Harold Rosenberg

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

31.

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

32.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

33.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

34.

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

35.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

36.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

38.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella

43.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

44.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

45.

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

Buxton, Charles

46.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

47.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

48.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

49.

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

50.

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory