Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

- Proverb, German

Best Quotes about Criticism

Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world -- though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst -- the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!

Sterne, Laurence

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Benjamin Disraeli

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

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

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

10.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

11.

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

Hampton, Christopher

12.

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

Guinon, Albert

13.

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

Richard Pryor

14.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Wilde, Oscar

16.

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

West, Rebecca

17.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

France, Anatole

21.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

25.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

26.

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

Miller, Henry

27.

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

28.

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

Collins, Jackie

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.

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

Clurman, Harold

32.

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

33.

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

Harold Rosenberg

34.

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

35.

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

36.

It is just as hard to do your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shouting at you.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

37.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

38.

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

39.

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

Bible

40.

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

Dale Carnegie

41.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

42.

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.

Mcclung, Nellie

43.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

47.

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

Byron, Lord

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

Orwell, George