Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Mascotte, John P.

Best Quotes about Criticism

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

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

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

Miller, Henry

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

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

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

Richard Pryor

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

Hugo, Victor

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

10.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

11.

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

12.

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

Shenstone, William

13.

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

14.

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

15.

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

16.

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

Holtz, Lou

17.

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

Proverb, Chinese

18.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

23.

The best criticism doesn't trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.

24.

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

25.

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

26.

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

Jean Sibelius

27.

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

Burns, Robert

28.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

29.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

30.

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

James, Clive

31.

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

32.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

33.

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

Cioran, E. M.

34.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

35.

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

36.

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

Elbert Hubbard

37.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

38.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

39.

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.

40.

The great critic must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.

Maugham, W. Somerset

41.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

42.

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.

43.

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

Native American Proverb

44.

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

45.

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

Mascotte, John P.

46.

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

Aikman, Leo

47.

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

48.

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

Updike, John

49.

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

Kundera, Milan

50.

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