Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Native American Proverb

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Guinon, Albert

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

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

Fuller, Margaret

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

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

11.

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

12.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

13.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

14.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

15.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

16.

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

17.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

18.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Kurt Vonnegut

19.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

20.

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

Johnson, Samuel

21.

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.

22.

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

Buxton, Charles

23.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

24.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

25.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

26.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Dahlberg, Edward

27.

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

Updike, John

28.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Porchia, Antonio

29.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

30.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

31.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

32.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.

Frye, Northrop

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Neither praise or blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Simms, William Gilmore

36.

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

Mizner, Wilson

37.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

Richard Pryor

40.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

41.

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

42.

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

43.

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

Jean Sibelius

44.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

45.

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

46.

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

Cocteau, Jean

47.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

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

49.

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

Little, Lynn M.

50.

Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.

Churchill, Charles