Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Olivier, Sir Lawrence

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Tynan, Kenneth

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

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

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

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

Nunn, Gregory

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

10.

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

Christopher Hampton

11.

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.

12.

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

Aikman, Leo

13.

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.

14.

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

Miller, Henry

15.

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works. An assault upon a town is a bad thing; but starving it is still worse.

Johnson, Samuel

16.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

17.

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

Mcluhan, Marshall

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

21.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

22.

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

23.

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

Hampton, Christopher

24.

Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

25.

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

Clurman, Harold

26.

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Rosenberg, Harold

27.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

28.

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

29.

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

30.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

31.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Steinbeck, John

32.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

33.

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

Shenstone, William

34.

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

Little, Lynn M.

35.

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

Buxton, Charles

36.

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

Cocteau, Jean

37.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

France, Anatole

38.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Fielding, Henry

42.

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

43.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

44.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

45.

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Hemingway, Ernest

46.

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

Nolan, Sir Sidney

47.

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

Kundera, Milan

48.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

49.

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