A critic is a man who
knows the way but can’t drive the car. - Kenneth Tynan
A critic is an
old maid that writes instructions to you concerning the rearing of your own
children. - Austin O’Malley
A
man who can't take a word of criticism hears it the most. - Ken
Alstad
A smile in giving honest criticism
can make the difference between resentment and reform. - Philip Steinmetz
A
true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than
imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and
communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.
- Joseph
Addison
A poet that
fails in writing, becomes often a morose critic. The weak and insipid white
wine makes at length excellent vinegar. - William
Shenstone
A
true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections. - Joseph
Addison
A young critic
is like a boy with a gun; he fires at every living thing he sees. He thinks
only of his own skill, not of the pain he is giving. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Against
criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act
in spite of it, and then criticism will gradually yield to him. -
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. - Ernest Hemingway
All you’ll get from strangers is surface
pleasantry or indifference. Only someone who loves you will criticize you. - Judith
Crist
An
author, whether good or bad, or between both, is an animal whom
everybody is privileged to attack: for though all are not able to
write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them. - Matthew
Gregory Lewis
Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain
but it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.
- Dale Carnegie
As
a matter of fact, we are none of us above criticism; so let us bear
with each other's faults. - L. Frank Baum
Be an
encourager. The world has plenty of critics already. - Dave Willis
Before you go and criticize the younger
generation, just remember who raised them. - Unknown
Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art. - David Toop
Criticism
is an indirect form of self-boasting. - Emmet Fox
Criticism
is easier to take when you realize that the only people who aren't
criticized are those who don't take risks. - Donald Trump
Criticism is futile because it
puts a man on the defensive, and usually makes him strive to justify himself.
Criticism is dangerous because it wounds a man’s precious pride, hurts his
sense of importance and arouses his resentment. - Unknown
Criticism
is just someone else’s opinion. Even people who are experts in
their fields are sometimes wrong. It is up to you to choose whether
to believe some of it, none of it, or all of it. What you think is
what counts. - Rodolfo Costa
Criticism is most effective when
it sounds like praise. - Arnold H Glasow
Criticism
is now become mere hangman's work, and meddles only with the faults
of authors; nay, the critic is disgusted less with their absurdities
than excellence; and you cannot displease him more than in leaving
him little room for his malice. - John Dryen
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. - Jean de La Bruyere
Criticism may not be agreeable,
but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It
calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. - Winston Churchill
Criticism
of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we
make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbours
that all his pictures are crooked. - Fulton J. Sheen
Criticism of ourselves and others
is rarely justified, and should cause us to consider seriously any thought
about other people and ourselves before we speak and send forth our criticism. -
Unknown
Criticism should
awaken our attention, not inflame our anger. We should listen to, and not flee
from, those who contradict us. Truth should be our cause, no matter in what
manner it comes to us. - Magdeleine Sable
Criticism
should be a casual conversation. - W.H Auden
Criticism should not be querulous
and wasting, but guiding, instructive, inspiring. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Criticism
very often consists of measuring the learning and the wisdom of
others, either by our own ignorance, or by our little technical and
pedantic partialities and prejudices. - Horace Smith
Criticism, like rain, should be
gentle enough to nourish a man’s growth without destroying his roots. - Frank
A. Clark
Criticism:
It is folly for an eminent person to think of escaping censure, and a weakness
to be affected by it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of
every age, have passed through this fiery persecution. There is no defense
against reproach but obscurity; it is a kind of concomitant to greatness, as
satires and invectives were an essential part of a Roman triumph. - Joseph
Addison
Critics are like
eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it
themselves. - Brendan Behan
Critics! Those
cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame. - Robert
Burns
Do
not seek praise. Seek criticism. - Paul Arden
Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be
criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. - Eleanor Roosevelt
Don’t be distracted criticism.
Remember, the only taste of success some people have is when they take a bit
out of you. - Zig Ziglar
Don't
criticize what you can't understand. - Bob Dylan
Don’t let the critics get you down. - Unknown
Give a critic an
inch, he’ll write a play. - John
Steinbeck
Having the
critics praise you is like having the hangman say you’ve got a pretty neck. - Eli Wallace
He has a right to criticize, who has a heart
to help. - Abraham Lincoln
How much easier it is to be critical than to
be correct. - Benjamin Disraeli
I
am more afraid of deserving criticism than of receiving it. - Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow
I
much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the
thoughtless approval of the masses. - Johannes Kepler
I
think it’s unfortunate to have critics for friends. Suppose you
write something that stinks, what are they going to say in a review?
Say it stinks? So, if they’re honest, they do, and if you were
friends you’re still friends, but the knowledge of your lousy
writing and their articulate admission of it will be always something
between the two of you, like the knowledge between a man and his wife
of some shady adultery. - William
Styron
If
criticism had any real power to harm, the skunk would have been
extinct by now. - Fred Allen
In
criticism I will be bold, and sternly, absolutely just with friend
and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me. - Edgar Allan
Poe
In
literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the
victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.
- John Steinbeck
In
the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it
were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is
normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal
experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.
- E.
M. Forster
It
is easier to criticize than to do better. - Swiss Proverb
It is easy to
criticize an author, but it is difficult to appreciate him. - Vauvenargues
Many
critics are like woodpeckers, who, instead of enjoying the fruit and
shadow of a tree, hop incessantly around the trunk, pecking holes in
the bark to discover some little worm or other. - Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow
Neither praise or blame is the
object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely
to prescribe, and honestly to award. These are the true aims and duties of criticism.
- William Gilmore Simms
Nothing
is complete and thus nothing is exempt from criticism. - James
Luther Adams
On
the whole, however, the critic is far less of a professional
faultfinder than is sometimes imagined. He is first of all a
virtue-finder, a singer of praise. He is not concerned with getting
rid of dross except in so far as it hides the gold. In other words,
the destructive side of criticism is purely a subsidiary affair. None
of the best critics have been men of destructive minds. They are like
gardeners whose business is more with the flowers than with the
weeds. - Robert
Wilson Lynd
Often the people who criticize your life
are usually the same people that don’t know the price you paid to get where you
are today. - Unknown
Often those that criticise others reveal what he himself
lacks. - Shannon L. Alder
One becomes a
critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when
he cannot be a soldier. - Gustave
Flaubert
Pay no attention to what the critics say; no
statue has ever been erected to a critic. -
Jean
Sibelius
People ask you for
criticism, but they only want praise. - William Somerset Maugham
Read
as little as possible of literary criticism – such things are
either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and
meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever
word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite
view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of
approach is so useless as criticism. - Rainer Maria Rilke
Sandwich
every bit of criticism between two layers of praise. - Mary
Kay Ash
Some people have self-esteem issues of their own, they use criticism
of others as a defence mechanism to make themselves better. - Unknown
Take heed of critics even when
they are not fair; resist them even when they are. - Jean Rostand
The
dread of criticism is the death of genius. - William
Gilmore Simms
The
exercise of criticism always destroys, for a time, our sensibility to
beauty by leading us to regard the work in relation to certain laws
of creation. The eye turns from the charms of nature to fix itself
upon the servile dexterity of art. - Alison
The
final proof of greatness lies in being able to endure criticism
without resentment. - Elbert Hubbard
The
finer house you build the sharper will be the criticism. - Lewis
F. Korns
The method of
the critic is to balance praises with censure, and thus to do justice to the
subject and – his own discrimination. - Christian
Nestell Bovee
The
most accomplished literary work would be reduced to nothing by
carping criticism, if the author would listen to all critics and
allow everyone to erase the passage which pleases him the least. -
Jean de La Bruyere
The
pleasure of criticism takes away from us the pleasure of being deeply
moved by very fine things. - Jean de La Bruyere
The
pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very
beautiful things. - Jean de la Bruyere
The right to criticize must be
earned, even if the advice is constructive in nature. Before you are entitled
to tinker with another person’s self-esteem, you are obligated first to
demonstrate your respect for him as a person. When a relationship of confidence
has been carefully constructed, you will have earned the right to discuss a
potentially threatening topic. Your motives will have been thereby clarified. -
Unknown
The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism. - Norman Vincent Peale
There are always
difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. - Ralph
Waldo Emerson
There
is no defence against criticism except obscurity. - Joseph
Addison
Time is the best
critic. - Amos Bronson Alcott
To escape criticism – do nothing,
say nothing, be nothing. - Elbert Hubbard
Unjust criticism
is usually disguised compliment. It often means that you have aroused jealously
and envy. Remember that no one ever kicks a dead log. -
Dale Carnegie
When a critic
sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the
manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor. - Edward Albee
When
we judge or criticize another person, it says nothing about that
person; it merely says something about our own need to be critical.
- Unknown
Whenever you feel like
criticizing any one… just remember that all the people in this world haven’t
had the advantages that you’ve had. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
You
find very few critics who approach their job with a combination of
information and enthusiasm and humility that makes for a good critic.
But there is nothing wrong with critics as long as people don't pay
any attention to them. I mean, nobody wants to put them out of a job
and a good critic is not necessarily a dead critic. It's just that
people take what a critic says as a fact rather than an opinion, and
you have to know whether the opinion of the critic is informed or
uninformed, intelligent of stupid – but most people don't take the
trouble. - Edward
Albee
You
have one of two choices. Either you can panic and start making
frantic attempts to reform under the glare of these awful critical
eyes, or you can just say, "The hell with you! I know what I'm
doing. If you don't yet, it's because you haven't given me an
attentive reading. - Saul Bellow
You worthy critics, or whatever you may call yourselves, are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators, the longer or shorter duration of which distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. Hence your complaints of unfruitfulness, for you reject too soon and discriminate too severely. - Friedrich von Schiller
