Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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.

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Wilde, Oscar

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

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

Aikman, Leo

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

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

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

Pollock, Channing

10.

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

11.

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

Briton, Crand

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

16.

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

Wolfe, Thomas

17.

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

18.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

19.

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

Burns, Robert

20.

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

21.

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

Miller, Henry

22.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Proverb, Chinese

31.

The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.

Gourmont, Remy De

32.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Dale Carnegie

34.

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

35.

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

Cocteau, Jean

36.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

37.

I know I'm never as good or bad as one single performance. I've never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I've always been able to leave the game at the arena.

Barkley, Charles

38.

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

Shenstone, William

39.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

40.

The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.

Little, Lynn M.

41.

David Lynch came out of it a genius, and I came out of it a fat girl. I'm sorry that the only comment I get about the part is the way I look. [Commenting on the critics' response to her performance in Blue Velvet]

Rossellini, Isabella

42.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

43.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

44.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

45.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

46.

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

47.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

48.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

49.

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

James, Clive

50.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.