Motivational Quotes

Criticism

When the critics come around it's always too late.

- Nolan, Sir Sidney

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

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

Jones, Franklin P.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

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

Rayburn, Sam

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

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Cocteau, Jean

10.

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

11.

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

Nunn, Gregory

12.

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

Holtz, Lou

13.

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

14.

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

Franklin P. Jones

15.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

16.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

17.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

18.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.

Christopher Hampton

19.

You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn't kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

No man ever got very high by pulling other people down. The intelligent merchant does not knock his competitors. The sensible worker does not work those who work with him. Don't knock your friends. Don't knock your enemies. Don't knock yourself.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

21.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

22.

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

Cioran, E. M.

23.

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

Rostand, Jean

24.

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

Helvetius, Claude A.

25.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

26.

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

Hugo, Victor

27.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

28.

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

29.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

30.

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

Shenstone, William

31.

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

32.

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

Flagg, Fannie

33.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

35.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Churchill, Winston

36.

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

Ziglar, Zig

37.

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

Burns, Robert

38.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Porchia, Antonio

42.

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

Elbert Hubbard

43.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

44.

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

45.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

46.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

47.

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

48.

Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.

Sontag, Susan

49.

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

Richard Pryor

50.

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