Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Jones, Franklin P.

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

Little, Lynn M.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

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

Franklin P. Jones

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Johnson, Samuel

10.

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

Updike, John

11.

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

Cocteau, Jean

12.

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.

13.

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

Richard Pryor

14.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

15.

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

16.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

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

France, Anatole

18.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

19.

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

Harold Rosenberg

20.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Benjamin, Walter

21.

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

22.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

23.

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

Mascotte, John P.

24.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

25.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

26.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

28.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- criticize.

29.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

31.

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

Moliere

32.

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.

33.

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.

34.

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

Native American Proverb

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

40.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

41.

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

42.

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

Pope, Alexander

43.

A man generally has the good or ill qualities he attributes to mankind.

Shenstone, William

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Bible

48.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

49.

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

50.

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