Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Roosevelt, Eleanor

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Burns, Robert

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

Edith Wharton

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

Cioran, E. M.

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

Hampton, Christopher

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

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

Churchill, Charles

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

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

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

14.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

15.

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

16.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

17.

In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.

Congreve, William

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.

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

Hoffman, Dustin

20.

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.

21.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

22.

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

Mizner, Wilson

23.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

24.

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

Guinon, Albert

25.

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

West, Rebecca

26.

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

Christopher Hampton

27.

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

Sontag, Susan

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

Byron, Lord

32.

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

33.

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

34.

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

35.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Tynan, Kenneth

36.

Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

Chandler, Raymond

37.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

Johnson, Samuel

39.

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

Richard Pryor

40.

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

Dale Carnegie

41.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

46.

When a man spends his time giving his wife criticism and advice instead of compliments, he forgets that it was not his good judgment, but his charming manners, that won her heart.

Rowland, Helen

47.

Strike the dog dead, it's but a critic!

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

49.

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

50.

Let me walk three weeks in the footsteps of my enemy, carry the same burden, have the same trials as he, before I say one word to criticize.