Quotes on Criticism

2
“You can disagree without being disagreeable.”
– Zig Ziglar

3
“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”
– Winston Churchill

4
“Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.”
– Andy Warhol

5
“You can’t let praise or criticism get to you. It’s a weakness to get caught up in either one.”
– John Wooden

6
“If you don’t have enemies, you don’t have character.”
– Paul Newman

7
“Nothing is complete and thus nothing is exempt from criticism.”
– James Luther Adams

8
“Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man’s growth without destroying his roots.”
– Frank A. Clark

9
“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”
– Kurt Vonnegut

10
“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.”
– Wole Soyinka

11
“Quit now, you’ll never make it. If you disregard this advice, you’ll be halfway there.”
– David Zucker

12
“People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.”
– Anne Tyler

13
“Once you label me you negate me.”
– Søren Kierkegaard

14
“We are not trying to entertain the critics. I’ll take my chances with the public.”
– Walt Disney

15
“He has the right to criticize who has the heart to help.”
– Abraham Lincoln

16
“Criticism is the art of appraising others at one’s own value.”
– George Jean Nathan

17
“He only profits from praise who values criticism.”
– Heinrich Heine

18
“A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her.”
– David Brinkley

19
“Harshness to me is giving somebody false hopes and not following through. That’s harsh. Telling some guy or some girl who’ve got zero talent that they have zero talent actually is a kindness.”
– Simon Cowell

20
“Don’t abuse your friends and expect them to consider it criticism.”
– Edgar Watson Howe

21
“Reprove a friend in secret, but praise him before others.”
– Leonardo da Vinci

22
“The price of success is to bear the criticism of envy.”
– Denis Waitley

23
“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”
– Epictetus

24
“I’m not nearly the saint some of my fans imagine and I’m nowhere near the devil my detractors wish, so you simply take both of those with a grain of salt.”
– Ken Wilber

24
“I paint for myself. I don’t know how to do anything else, anyway.”
– Francis Bacon

25
“To love without criticism is to be betrayed.”
– Djuna Barnes

26
“No matter who says what, you should accept it with a smile and do your own work.”
– Mother Teresa

27
“Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within.”
– Edmund Husserl

28
“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.”
– Henry David Thoreau

29
“According to my principles, every master has his true and certain value. Praise and criticism cannot change any of that. Only the work itself praises and criticizes the master, and therefore I leave to everyone his own value.”
– Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

30
“Criticism is prejudice made plausible.”
– H.L. Mencken

31
“How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

32
“Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.”
– Emmet Fox

33
“Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism.”
– Wendell Phillips

34
“Praise and criticism seem to me to operate exactly on the same level. If you get a great review, it’s really thrilling for about ten minutes. If you get a bad review, it’s really crushing for ten minutes. Either way, you go on.”
– Ann Patchett

35
“Silence is sometimes the severest criticism.”
– Charles Buxton

36
“You are never really prepared for criticism.”
– Barry Gibb

37
“Nothing that goes on in anyone else’s mind can harm you.”
– Marcus Aurelius

38
“Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.”
–Antisthenes

39
“People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.”
– W. Somerset Maugham

40
“Critics like to build you up, tear you down, and then, if you’re lucky, build you up again.”
– Spike Lee

41
“If you have no critics you’ll likely have no success.”
– Malcolm X

42
“Obviously there will be a backlash. If you believe the hype you have to believe a backlash too. Any criticism we get, is always stuff we’ve already criticized ourselves.”
– Johnny Greenwood

43
“Even the lion has to defend himself against flies.”
– German Proverb

44
“Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.”
– Octavio Paz

45
“Criticism in a time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government.”
– Robert Taft

46
“The dread of criticism is the death of genius.”
– William Gilmore Simms

47
“In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.”
– Edgar Allan Poe

48
“Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.”
– Bertrand Russel

49
“Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.”
– Karl Popper

50
“Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art.”
– David Toop