Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- La Bruyere, Jean De

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Briton, Crand

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

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

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

Holtz, Lou

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

Updike, John

I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, "I wanna grow up and be a critic."

Richard Pryor

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

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

10.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

11.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

12.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

13.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

15.

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

Nunn, Gregory

16.

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

17.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

18.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George

19.

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

Dale Carnegie

20.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

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.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

23.

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

Franklin P. Jones

24.

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

Elbert Hubbard

25.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

26.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

Lawrence, D. H.

27.

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.

Fuller, Margaret

28.

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

29.

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

Proverb, Chinese

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.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

32.

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

Rostand, Jean

33.

If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

34.

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

35.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

36.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

37.

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

Bible

38.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

39.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

40.

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

Burns, Robert

41.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

42.

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

43.

Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

44.

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

45.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

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.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

48.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.