Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Roosevelt, Eleanor

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Baudrillard, Jean

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

Kundera, Milan

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

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

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

Richard Pryor

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

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Keats, John

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.

10.

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

West, Rebecca

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Lowell, James Russell

15.

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

Buxton, Charles

16.

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

Nunn, Gregory

17.

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

Pollock, Channing

18.

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

19.

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

Wilde, Oscar

20.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Thoreau, Henry David

21.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

22.

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

Hill, Napoleon

23.

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

24.

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

25.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

26.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

James, Henry

27.

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

Holtz, Lou

28.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Aragon, Louis

29.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Dale Carnegie

33.

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.

34.

I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Smith, Sydney

35.

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

Sontag, Susan

36.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

37.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

38.

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

Hampton, Christopher

39.

Give me the critic bred in Nature's school, who neither talks by rote, nor thinks by rule; who feeling's honest dictates still obeys, and dares, without a precedent, to praise.

Shee, Sir Martin Archer

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

Mizner, Wilson

45.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La

46.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

47.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art -- and, by analogy, our own experience -- more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Sontag, Susan

48.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

49.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

50.

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

Raphael, Frederic