Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

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

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

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

Shenstone, William

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

For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.

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

James, Henry

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

10.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

11.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

12.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

13.

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

Rayburn, Sam

14.

A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car.

Tynan, Kenneth

15.

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

16.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

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

Kael, Pauline

18.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

19.

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

Steinbeck, John

20.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

21.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

22.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

23.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

24.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

25.

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

Miller, Henry

26.

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

Pollock, Channing

27.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Aragon, Louis

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

33.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

34.

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

35.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

36.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John

37.

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

Richard Pryor

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

42.

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

Guinon, Albert

43.

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

44.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

45.

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

46.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

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

Hoffman, Dustin

48.

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

Byron, Lord

49.

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

50.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Eliot, T. S.