Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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.

Best Quotes about Criticism

Having a sharp tongue will cut your throat

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

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

Richard Pryor

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

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

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

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

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

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

Churchill, Charles

10.

Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.

Fox, Dr. Emmit

11.

Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at.

12.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

13.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

14.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

15.

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

16.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

17.

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.

18.

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

Dale Carnegie

19.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest

20.

Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Smith, Sydney

24.

He who throws dirt always loses ground.

25.

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

Holtz, Lou

26.

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

Hammarskjold, Dag

27.

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

28.

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

29.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

30.

I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

31.

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

32.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Wilde, Oscar

33.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Pound, Ezra

34.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

35.

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

Schlegel, Friedrich

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Kundera, Milan

39.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Benjamin, Walter

41.

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

42.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

43.

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

44.

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

Franklin P. Jones

45.

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

46.

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

Mcclung, Nellie

47.

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