Motivational Quotes

Criticism

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

Famous Inspirational Daily Quotes

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Steinbeck, John

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge ourselves with railing against it.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

Fuller, Margaret

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

Pollock, Channing

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

10.

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

11.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

13.

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

14.

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

Franklin P. Jones

15.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

16.

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.

17.

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

18.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

Simms, William Gilmore

19.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Cocteau, Jean

20.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Benjamin, Walter

21.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

22.

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

23.

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

Christopher Hampton

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

27.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

31.

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

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Epictetus

34.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Disraeli, Benjamin

35.

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

36.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Woolf, Virginia

37.

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

38.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

39.

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

40.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

41.

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

42.

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

Wilde, Oscar

43.

I remember when I was in college, people told me I couldn't play in the NBA. There's always somebody saying you can't do it, and those people have to be ignored.

Cartwright, Bill

44.

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

Mascotte, John P.

45.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

46.

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

Churchill, Charles

47.

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

48.

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

Ziglar, Zig

49.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

50.

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

Shenstone, William