Motivational Quotes

Criticism

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

- Moliere

Best Quotes about Criticism

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

Holtz, Lou

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

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

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

Dale Carnegie

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

Briton, Crand

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden

If what they are saying about you is true, mend your ways. If it isn't true, forget it, and go on and serve the Lord.

Ironside, H. A.

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it.

Rayburn, Sam

What we ask of him is, that he should find out for us more than we can find out for ourselves. He must have the passion of a lover.

Symons, Arthur

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

10.

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

11.

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

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

12.

Be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

Bible

13.

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

Aikman, Leo

14.

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

15.

Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

17.

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

Fuller, Margaret

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Benjamin, Walter

21.

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

Raphael, Frederic

22.

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

23.

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

Buxton, Charles

24.

One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.

Moliere

25.

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

Churchill, Charles

26.

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

Wilde, Oscar

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.

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

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

31.

Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.

Proverb, German

32.

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

Steinbeck, John

33.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken

34.

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

35.

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

36.

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.

Mencken, H. L.

37.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Lowell, James Russell

38.

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

39.

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

Burns, Robert

40.

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

41.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Steinbeck, John

42.

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

Johnson, Samuel

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Collins, Jackie

46.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

47.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

48.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

49.

Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil.

Helvetius, Claude A.

50.

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