Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Native American Proverb

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

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

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

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

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

10.

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

11.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

17.

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

18.

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

Nunn, Gregory

19.

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded.

Klee, Paul

20.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

22.

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

Holtz, Lou

23.

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

Steinbeck, John

24.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

25.

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

26.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

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

28.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

29.

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

30.

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

Johnson, Samuel

31.

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

Rayburn, Sam

32.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

Hampton, Christopher

33.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Chandler, Raymond

34.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

Buxton, Charles

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

38.

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

Pollock, Channing

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

41.

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.

42.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

43.

In an age of unscrupulous and shameless book-making, it is a duty to give notice of the rubbish that cumbers the ground. There is no credit, no real power required for this task. It is the work of an intellectual scavenger, and far from being specially honorable.

Hutton, R. H.

44.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

45.

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

Dale Carnegie

46.

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

47.

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

James, Henry

48.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

49.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

50.

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