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.
—Nelson Algren (1909–81) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
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.
—Tryon Edwards American Theologian
Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.
—Charles Buxton (1823–71) British Politician, Writer
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.
—Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish Painter, Sculptor, Artist
It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.
—Marshall Mcluhan (1911–80) Canadian Writer, Thinker, Educator
The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews. The ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews.
—William Faulkner (1897–1962) American Novelist
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 (1884–1962) American First Lady, Diplomat, Humanitarian
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.
—Leonardo DiCaprio (b.1974) American Actor, Film Producer
Any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.
—Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) American Self-Help Author
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.
—John Keats (1795–1821) English Poet
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.
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) British Head of State
We are suffering from too much sarcasm.
—Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American Poet
Criticism of others is futile and if you indulge in it often you should be warned that it can be fatal to your career.
—Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) American Self-Help Author
I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English Clergyman, Essayist, Wit
The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted or who have failed in original composition.
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English Essayist
I’d rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.
—Victor Hugo (1802–85) French Novelist
Those who can—do. Those who can’t—criticize.
—Indian Proverb
On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one’s mind. It becomes a pleasure.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
Of all mortals a critic is the silliest; for, inuring himself to examine all things, whether they are of consequence or not, he never looks upon anything but with a design of passing sentence upon it; by which means he is never a companion, but always a censer.
—Richard Steele (1672–1729) Irish Writer, Politician
We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.
—Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87) American Clergyman, Writer
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
—Iris Murdoch (1919–99) British Novelist, Playwright, Philosopher
A critic is a legless man who teaches running.
—Channing Pollock (1880–1946)
American Playwright, Critic
To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) French Poet, Art Critic, Essayist, Translator
The covers of this book are too far apart.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) American Short-story Writer, Journalist
Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.
—John Steinbeck (1902–68) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Journalist
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.
—Kenneth Tynan (1927–80) English Theatre Critic, Writer
If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) American Political Leader, Inventor, Diplomat
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.
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American Novelist, Playwright
There is one way to handle the ignorant and malicious critic. Ignore him.
—Unknown
The best criticism doesn’t trap an employee or child in a dead end. It gives them an escape route.
—Indian Proverb
Critics are a kind of freebooters in the republic of letters, who, like deer, goats, and diverse other graminivorous animals, gain subsistence by gorging upon buds and leaves of the young shrubs of the forest, thereby robbing them of their verdure and retarding their progress to maturity.
—Washington Irving (1783–1859) American Essayist, Biographer, Historian
After all, one knows one’s weak points so well, that it’s rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
—Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American Novelist, Short-story Writer
He who throws dirt always loses ground.
—Indian Proverb
The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
If I care to listen to every criticism, let alone act on them, then this shop may as well be closed for all other businesses. I have learned to do my best, and if the end result is good then I do not care for any criticism, but if the end result is not good, then even the praise of ten angels would not make the difference.
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) American Head of State
There is scarcely a good critic of books born in our age, and yet every fool thinks himself justified in criticising persons.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803–73) British Novelist, Poet, Politician
The whole effort of a sincere man is to erect his personal impressions into laws.
—Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915) French Poet, Novelist, Critic
Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather than its defects.—The passions of men have made it malignant, as the bad heart of Procrustes turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) American Poet, Educator, Academic
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.
—Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) American Novelist, Short-Story Writer
There is no defense against criticism except obscurity.
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719) English Essayist, Poet, Playwright, Politician
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.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Poet, Dramatist, Essayist, Novelist
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 (1707–54) English Novelist, Dramatist
It is usually best to be generous with praise, but cautious with criticism.
—Unknown
The person of analytic or critical intellect finds something ridiculous in everything. The person of synthetic or constructive intellect, in almost nothing.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.
—Emmet Fox (1886–1951) Irish-American New Thought Leader
Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.
—German Proverb
Criticism is the disapproval of people, not for having faults, but having faults different from your own.
—Anonymous
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.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
—Octavio Paz (1914–98) Mexican Poet, Diplomat