Motivational Quotes

Criticism

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.

- Wolfe, Thomas

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Baudrillard, Jean

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

Buxton, Charles

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

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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

Fielding, Henry

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

Turner, Ted

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

Take heed of critics even when they are not fair; resist them even when they are.

Rostand, Jean

10.

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

Guinon, Albert

11.

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Buxton, Charles

12.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Lewis, Sinclair

13.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

14.

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.

15.

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

Cocteau, Jean

16.

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

17.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

Gibbon, Edward

18.

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

19.

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

Hampton, Christopher

20.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.

Proverb, Chinese

21.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

22.

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

23.

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

24.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

28.

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

29.

Critics are usually kinder to cheaper movies than to those they perceive to be big Hollywood releases. They cut you a lot more slack if you spend less money, which makes no sense.

Coen, Ethan

30.

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

Nunn, Gregory

31.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do.

Costello, Elvis

32.

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

Aikman, Leo

33.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Baudelaire, Charles

34.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

35.

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

36.

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

Wilde, Oscar

37.

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

38.

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

39.

Some people are always critical of vague statements. I tend rather to be critical of precise statements; they are the only ones which can correctly be labeled wrong.

Smullyan, Raymond

40.

A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.

Hoffman, Dustin

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

45.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

46.

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

Mascotte, John P.

47.

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

48.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

49.

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

50.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius