Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

- Proverb, Chinese

Best Quotes about Criticism

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

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

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.

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

As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.

James, Clive

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

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

10.

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

Richard Pryor

11.

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

Flagg, Fannie

12.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Bible

16.

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.

17.

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

Wilde, Oscar

18.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

West, Rebecca

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

22.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

23.

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

24.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

25.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

26.

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

27.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

28.

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

Little, Lynn M.

29.

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

Pollock, Channing

30.

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

31.

Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.

Carnegie, Dale

32.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

33.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

34.

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

Holtz, Lou

35.

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

Shenstone, William

36.

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

37.

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

Steinbeck, John

38.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Byron, Lord

42.

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.

43.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

44.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

49.

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

Kundera, Milan

50.

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

Elbert Hubbard