Motivational Quotes

Criticism

When everyone is against you, it means you are absolutely wrong -- or you are absolutely right.

- Guinon, Albert

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Moliere

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

Williams, Bern

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

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

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

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

Mascotte, John P.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Collins, Jackie

14.

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

15.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

16.

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

Harold Rosenberg

17.

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

Johnson, Samuel

18.

When the critics come around it's always too late.

Nolan, Sir Sidney

19.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

20.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

21.

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

22.

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

23.

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney

24.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

25.

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

Mizner, Wilson

26.

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

Hugo, Victor

27.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

28.

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

Dale Carnegie

29.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Aragon, Louis

30.

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.

31.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

Baudrillard, Jean

32.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

33.

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

Paz, Octavio

34.

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.

35.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

36.

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

37.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

France, Anatole

41.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

42.

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.

43.

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Hemingway, Ernest

44.

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

Kundera, Milan

45.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

46.

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

47.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

48.

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

Shenstone, William

49.

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

50.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence