Motivational Quotes

Criticism

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

- Dale Carnegie

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

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

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

Native American Proverb

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

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

Proverb, Chinese

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.

Algren, Nelson

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

Elbert Hubbard

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

10.

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

Guinon, Albert

11.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

12.

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

Wilde, Oscar

13.

Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

14.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

15.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

16.

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

17.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

18.

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

19.

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

Rostand, Jean

20.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic -- a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

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.

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.

24.

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

25.

There's a fine line between participation and mockery.

Adams, Scott

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

29.

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

30.

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

Buxton, Charles

31.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

32.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Johnson, Samuel

33.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

34.

We protest against unjust criticism but we accept unarmed applause.

Narosky, Jose

35.

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

36.

The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Fiedler, Leslie

37.

Satire is often the reflection of a kind of moral nausea.

Briton, Crand

38.

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

39.

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

Holtz, Lou

40.

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

Collins, Jackie

41.

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

42.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

43.

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Addison, Joseph

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

50.

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

Wilde, Oscar