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

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

Briton, Crand

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

Johnson, Samuel

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

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

Hoffman, Dustin

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

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

Rayburn, Sam

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

Rostand, Jean

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

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

10.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

11.

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

12.

Each generation produces its squad of moderns with peashooters to attack Gibraltar.

Pollock, Channing

13.

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

14.

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

Churchill, Charles

15.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

19.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

20.

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.

21.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

22.

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

23.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

24.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

25.

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

26.

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

27.

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

Smith, Sydney

28.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

29.

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

Clurman, Harold

30.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

31.

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

Dale Carnegie

32.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

33.

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

34.

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

Guinon, Albert

35.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

36.

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

37.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Cocteau, Jean

38.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

39.

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

40.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

44.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

45.

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

Hugo, Victor

46.

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

47.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

48.

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

Mascotte, John P.

49.

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

Buxton, Charles

50.

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.