Motivational Quotes

Criticism

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

- Churchill, Winston

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

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

Churchill, Charles

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

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

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

Turner, Ted

In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.

Carruthers, Charles Edwin

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

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

Sontag, Susan

10.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

11.

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

Erasmus, Desiderius

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

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

17.

You should not say it is not good. You should say you do not like it; and then, you know, you're perfectly safe.

Whistler, James Mcneill

18.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Lowell, James Russell

19.

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

Miller, Henry

20.

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

21.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

22.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

23.

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

Paz, Octavio

24.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

25.

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

Costello, Elvis

26.

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

27.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

28.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

29.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

Auden, W. H.

30.

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

31.

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

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

33.

Critics! Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame.

Burns, Robert

34.

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

Cicero, Marcus T.

35.

Blame is safer than praise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

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

38.

Every writer is necessarily a critic -- that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

Wilder, Thornton

39.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Kael, Pauline

40.

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

41.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

42.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

43.

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

Proverb, Chinese

44.

People who ask for your criticism want only praise.

Maugham, W. Somerset

45.

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

46.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

Berger, John

47.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of meanings.

Sontag, Susan

48.

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Collins, Jackie

49.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

50.

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.

Bruyere, Jean De La