Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Criticism

You should never assume contempt for that which it is not very manifest that you have it in your power to possess, nor does a wit ever make a more contemptible figure than when, in attempting satire, he shows that he does not understand that which he would make the subject of his ridicule.

Melbourne, Lord

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

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

Gourmont, Remy De

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

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

Tynan, Kenneth

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Murdoch, Iris

Never make the mistake of assuming the critters will beat a path to your door.

Mascotte, John P.

10.

For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse -- why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley

11.

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

Nunn, Gregory

12.

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

Guinon, Albert

13.

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

14.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

15.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

16.

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

17.

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

Byron, Lord

18.

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.

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.

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

21.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

Fiedler, Leslie

22.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

23.

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

Steinbeck, John

24.

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

25.

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

Shenstone, William

26.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

27.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.

Henry Fielding

28.

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

Buxton, Charles

29.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

30.

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.

31.

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

Cioran, E. M.

32.

No sadder proof can be given of a person's own tiny stature, than their disbelief in great people.

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Updike, John

34.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.

James, Clive

36.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

37.

A film is just like a muffin. You make it. You put it on the table. One person might say, Oh, I don't like it. One might say it's the best muffin ever made. One might say it's an awful muffin. It's hard for me to say. It's for me to make the muffin.

Washington, Denzel

38.

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

39.

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

West, Rebecca

40.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

41.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Picasso, Pablo

42.

Did some more sober critics come abroad? If wrong, I smil'd; if right, I kiss'd the rod.

Pope, Alexander

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Hampton, Christopher

46.

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

Christopher Hampton

47.

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

Hill, Napoleon

48.

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