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

Schlegel, Friedrich

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

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

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.

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

Richard Pryor

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

Sontag, Susan

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

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

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

Baudrillard, Jean

10.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

11.

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

12.

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

13.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Kundera, Milan

17.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

18.

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

19.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

20.

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

21.

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

Buxton, Charles

22.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

Paz, Octavio

23.

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

Dale Carnegie

24.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

25.

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.

26.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

27.

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

Aikman, Leo

28.

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

29.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

Dahlberg, Edward

30.

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

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

France, Anatole

37.

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

38.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

39.

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

James, Clive

40.

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

Elbert Hubbard

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

42.

You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism.

Maugham, W. Somerset

43.

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

44.

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

Turner, Ted

45.

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

46.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Chandler, Raymond

47.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

48.

If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Lincoln, Abraham

49.

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

50.

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