Motivational Quotes

Criticism

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

- Narosky, Jose

Best Quotes about Criticism

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

Mizner, Wilson

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Byron, Lord

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

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

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Jones, Franklin P.

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

Cocteau, Jean

10.

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

Updike, John

11.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

12.

No matter how well you perform there's always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

13.

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

Johnson, Samuel

14.

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

15.

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

Turner, Ted

16.

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

17.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

18.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

19.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

20.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

21.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La

22.

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.

23.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

24.

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

Rostand, Jean

25.

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

26.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

30.

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

Holtz, Lou

31.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

32.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

33.

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

Adorno, Theodor W.

35.

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

Miller, Henry

36.

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

Pollock, Channing

37.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

38.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Kundera, Milan

47.

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

Rayburn, Sam

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord