Motivational Quotes

Criticism

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

- Hemingway, Ernest

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

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.

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

Briton, Crand

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

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

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

10.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

11.

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

Moliere

12.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

13.

If you burn your neighbors house down, it doesn't make your house look any better.

Holtz, Lou

14.

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

Williams, Bern

15.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

16.

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth

17.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

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 critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

20.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

21.

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

Hoffman, Dustin

22.

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

23.

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

24.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

25.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

26.

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

27.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

28.

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

29.

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

Turner, Ted

30.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

31.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

Rayburn, Sam

36.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

37.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Cioran, E. M.

38.

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

39.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

44.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

45.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

46.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

47.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

48.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

49.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

50.

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

Churchill, Charles