Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Hoffman, Dustin

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Aikman, Leo

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

Holtz, Lou

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

Buxton, Charles

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

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

Updike, John

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

12.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

13.

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

Steinbeck, John

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.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

16.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Guinon, Albert

19.

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

20.

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

Franklin P. Jones

21.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

22.

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

23.

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure -- critics all are ready made.

Byron, Lord

24.

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

Bible

25.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

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.

27.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

28.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

29.

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

Mascotte, John P.

30.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

31.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

32.

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

33.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

34.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

35.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

Benjamin Disraeli

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

40.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

41.

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

Hampton, Christopher

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

49.

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

50.

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

Williams, Bern