Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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.

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

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do.

Dale Carnegie

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

Sontag, Susan

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

10.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

11.

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

Steinbeck, John

12.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

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

14.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

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.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

21.

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

Epictetus

22.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

23.

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

24.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

25.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

26.

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

Kundera, Milan

27.

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

28.

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

Churchill, Charles

29.

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

30.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

32.

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

Elbert Hubbard

33.

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

Cocteau, Jean

34.

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

Fuller, Margaret

35.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

36.

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

Updike, John

37.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

38.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

39.

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

Collins, Jackie

40.

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

41.

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

42.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

43.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

44.

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

45.

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

46.

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

47.

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

Aikman, Leo

48.

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

49.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

50.

You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

Whistler, James Mcneill