Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Schlegel, Friedrich

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

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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

Sontag, Susan

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

10.

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

Harold Rosenberg

11.

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

Cioran, E. M.

12.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

13.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

14.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

15.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

16.

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

Moliere

17.

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

Briton, Crand

18.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

19.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

24.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

25.

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

Aikman, Leo

26.

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

Johnson, Samuel

27.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

28.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

29.

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

30.

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

Kundera, Milan

31.

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

Mizner, Wilson

32.

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

Shenstone, William

33.

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

34.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

35.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

36.

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory

37.

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

Native American Proverb

38.

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

Fielding, Henry

39.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

40.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

41.

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

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.

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

Elbert Hubbard

44.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

45.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

46.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.