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

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

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

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

France, Anatole

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

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

Jones, Franklin P.

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

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

Baudrillard, Jean

10.

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

11.

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

Churchill, Charles

12.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

14.

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

Shenstone, William

15.

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

Burns, Robert

16.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

17.

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

Mascotte, John P.

18.

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

Holtz, Lou

19.

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

20.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

21.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

22.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

23.

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

Hugo, Victor

24.

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

25.

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

Byron, Lord

26.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

27.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Eleanor Roosevelt

28.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

37.

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

Cioran, E. M.

38.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

39.

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

Jean Sibelius

40.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

41.

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

Guinon, Albert

42.

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

43.

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

Sontag, Susan

44.

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.

45.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

46.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

47.

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

Updike, John

48.

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.

49.

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

Dale Carnegie

50.

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.