Criticism is an inevitable part of life, but how we perceive and respond to it can make all the difference. Whether it’s constructive feedback that helps us grow or harsh words that challenge our resilience, criticism often holds valuable lessons. In this collection of 119 inspiring criticism quotes, you’ll find wisdom and perspective to embrace feedback with an open mind, turning challenges into opportunities for personal and professional development.
1. “The covers of this book are too far apart.” - Ambrose Bierce
2. “The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.” - Joseph Heller
3. “Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?” - Neil Postman
4. “Herr Kafka, essen Sie keine Eier." (As one and only piece of dialog K recalls from his meeting with Rudolf Steiner - "Mr. Kafka don't eat eggs.” - Franz Kafka
5. “Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things. If it is heeded in time, danger may be averted; if it is suppressed, a fatal distemper may develop."[New Statesman interview, 7 January 1939]” - Winston Churchill
6. “They have a Right to censure, that have a Heart to help: The rest is Cruelty, not Justice.(Frequently misquoted as "He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.")” - William Penn
7. “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. ” - Susan Sontag
8. “Bosch is great because what he imagines in color can be translated into justice.” - Edward Dahlberg
9. “The words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
10. “When someone offers you lines like that, he must be Mephistopheles and you must be Faust. You know you shouldn't succumb to such language, but you succumb.” - William Logan
11. “You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.” - Winston Churchill
12. “A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, and in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: 'This tower is most interesting.' But they also said (after pushing it over): 'What a muddle it is in!' And even the man's own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: 'He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? he had no sense of proportion.' But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
13. “Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.” - Virginia Woolf
14. “A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.” - Virginia Woolf
15. “I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.” - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
16. “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
17. “We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But then you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.” - Camille Paglia
18. “But instead of spending our lives running towards our dreams, we are often running away from a fear of failure or a fear of criticism.” - Eric Wright
19. “من الناس من يتخذ من المناصب الحكومية طبقات في العلم يوشك من ارتقاها مرة ألا يصعد إلية صوت ناقد” - مصطفى صبري
20. “دعوة علماء الدين إلى أن يكونوا رسل الديمقراطية الإسلامية بالسعي لتعديل مابين طبقات الناس من الفروق الشاسعة” - مصطفى صبري
21. “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
22. “Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art” - David Toop
23. “The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.” - G.K. Chesterton
24. “Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so” - Gertrude Atherton
25. “You need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything” - Gustave Flaubert
26. “These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.” - Henry Adams
27. “It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.” - Chuck Klosterman
28. “[If] you are ready enough to pull my knitting to pieces, but provide none of your own, the only sock is a sock in the jaw!” - J.R. Ackerley
29. “Anyone who finds himself incapable of grasping the complexities of a work hides his withdrawal behind the most superficial pretext because he has not gotten past the surface.” - Julio Cortazar
30. “We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.” - Jonathan Swift
31. “Corporate irony not only ridicules the thing it is selling but the very act of selling it. In the process it disarms critics by making anyone who goes against the flow of commerce seem clueless.” - David Denby
32. “The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
33. “At that shameful stage in the development of our criticism, literary abuse would overstep all limits of decorum; literature itself was a totally extraneous matter in critical articles: they were pure invective, a vulgar battle of vulgar jokes, double-entendres, the most vicious calumnies and offensive constructions. It goes without saying, that in this inglorious battle, the only winners were those who had nothing to lose as far as their good name was concerned. My friends and I were totally deluded. We imagined ourselves engaged in the subtle philosophical disputes of the portico or the academy, or at least the drawing room. In actual fact we were slumming it.” - Vladimir Odoevsky
34. “In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.” - Charles Simic
35. “This is what is known as perspective, and it is a swindle.” - Kurt Schwitters
36. “If we wanted to construct a basic philosophical attitude from these scientific utterances of Pauli's, at first we would be inclined to infer from them an extreme rationalism and a fundamentally skeptical point of view. In reality however, behind this outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest even in those dark areas of reality of the human mind which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli's analyses of physical problems was admittedly due in some measure to the detailed and penetrating clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of creative processes, for which no rational formulation as yet exists.” - Werner Heisenberg
37. “The popular distinction between 'constructive' and 'destructive' criticism is a sentimentality: the mind too weak to perceive in what respects the bad fails is not strong enough to appreciate in what the good succeeds. To be without discrimination is to be unable to praise. The critic who lets you know that he always looks for something to like in works he discusses is not telling you anything about the works or about art; he is saying 'see what a nice person I am.” - Brigid Brophy
38. “When sonneteering Wordsworth re-creates the landing of Mary Queen of Scots at the mouth of the Derwent -Dear to the Loves, and to the Graces vowed,The Queen drew back the wimple that she wore- he unveils nothing less than a canvas by Rubens, baroque master of baroque masters; this is the landing of a TRAGIC Marie de Medicis.Yet so receptive was the English ear to sheep-Wordsworth's perverse 'Enough of Art' that it is not any of these works of supreme art, these master-sonnets of English literature, that are sold as picture postcards, with the text in lieu of the view, in the Lake District! it is those eternally, infernally sprightly Daffodils.” - Brigid Brophy
39. “If we wear our worst reviews like a backpack, they travel with us.” - Jennifer Love Hewitt
40. “If Patti Lupone was born to play Evita then Madonna was born to play Patti Lupone playing Evita.” - Buck Bannister
41. “Writers shouldn't fear criticism. Instead, they should fear silence. Criticism is healthy. It gets people thinking about your work and, even better, it gets them talking and arguing. But as for silence -- it is the greatest killer of writers. So if you hate a book and want to hurt it -- don't talk about it. And if you hate my books -- please, for God's sake, shout it from the hills! ” - Robert Fanney
42. “Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.” - A.E. Housman
43. “On Art Garfunkel - He makes Paul Simon look like LL Cool J.” - Ian Gittins
44. “Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better.” - Stephen Potter
45. “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 neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.” - Fulton J. Sheen
46. “Ivanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them without much success, which led him, after long reflection (a whole summer night), to the astute decision that he should write in the manner of Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov. Fifty percent Odoevsky and fifty percent Lazhecknikov. This went over well, in part because readers, their memories mostly faulty, had forgotten poor Odoevsky (1803-1869) and poor Lazhechnikov (1792-1869), who died the same year, and in part because literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing.” - Roberto Bolaño
47. “Nobody kicks a dead dog” - Dale Carnegie
48. “I stared at her. "But she drugged us.""That is no longer news, dumbass. Are you going to ask why she drugged you?""Allright," I said, narrowing my eyes. "Why?""Because, dear October, you're the most passively suicidal person I've ever met, and that's saying something. You'll never open your wrists, but you'll run headfirst into hell. You'll have good reasons. You'll have great reasons, even. And a part of you will be praying that you won't come out again.” - Seanan McGuire
49. “The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.” - C.S. Lewis
50. “This mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people—because, surely, Wally was nice—would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At. St. Cloud's, criticism was plainer—and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.” - John Irving
51. “A novel is a tricky thing to map.” - Reif Larsen
52. “Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes.” - Virginia Woolf
53. “I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.” - Leonard Bernstein
54. “...it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.” - Karl Marx
55. “Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, orperhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn't know. But I amsure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.” - Aaron Copland
56. “The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.” - Gore Vidal
57. “The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.” - Bruce Sterling
58. “There is only one thing left for you to do,” John Sloan advised one artist. “Pull off your socks and try with your feet.” - Ross Wetzsteon
59. “A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment.” - John Wooden
60. “A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.” - Northrop Frye
61. “When virtues are pointed out first, flaws seem less insurmountable.” - Judith Martin
62. “The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics.” - C.S. Lewis
63. “A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.” - C.S. Lewis
64. “Criticism is an act of love. We can never learn those people we love, but we can learn about them in such ways as to perceive more clearly that unfathomable, mysterious core that is the source of their beauty.” - Richard L. McGuire
65. “But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative -- useless synonyms for good or for bad.” - C.S. Lewis
66. “If you are ever called upon to chasten a person, never chasten beyond the balm you have within you to bind up.” - Brigham Young
67. “You don’t create a diamond by rubbing it with fluffy bunny slippers. You need to apply pressure and heat. There are enough air-headed cheerleaders out there. We need more drill sergeants.” - Julie Ann Dawson
68. “There’s one kind of writing that’s always easy: Picking out something obviously stupid and reiterating how stupid it obviously is. This is the lowest form of criticism, easily accomplished by anyone. And for most of my life, I have tried to avoid this. In fact, I’ve spend an inordinate amount of time searching for the underrated value in ostensibly stupid things. I understand Turtle’s motivation and I would have watched Medelin in the theater. I read Mary Worth every day for a decade. I’ve seen Korn in concert three times and liked them once. I went to The Day After Tomorrow on opening night. I own a very expensive robot that doesn’t do anything. I am open to the possibility that everyting has metaphorical merit, and I see no point in sardonically attacking the most predictable failures within any culture.” - Chuck Klosterman
69. “...and - holy shit was this song bad. It was like the singer was stabbing my ear with a dagger made of dried turds.” - David Wong
70. “Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them would might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them.” - Joris-Karl Huysmans
71. “A lot of people who find out about the things I do immediately figure I'm just a pathetic "druggie" with nothing to say that is worth hearing. They talk endless bull shit of "recovery!" They make it sound like some amazing discovery...don't they know I'm far too busy trying to recover me?” - Ashly Lorenzana
72. “His forward voice now is to speak well of his friend. His backward voice is to utter foul speeches and to detract.” - William Shakespeare
73. “History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.” - James Fenimore Cooper
74. “The devil's happy when the critics run you off.” - Criss Jami
75. “لله درّ من قال:وليس بناج من مقالة طاعنولو كنت في غار على جبل وعر ومن ذا الذي ينجو من الناس سالماًولو غاب عنهم بين خافيتي نسر Nor could I ever escape from abuse, Even were I in a cave in a rugged mountain; For who can escape from the people unharmed, Even if he hides behind the eagle's wings?” - Muhammad Naasir-ud-Deen al-Albaani
76. “The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.” - D.H. Lawrence
77. “Context is everything in both narrative and real life, and while the accusation is never that these creators deliberately set out to discriminate against gay and female characters, the unavoidable implication is that they should have known better than to add to the sum total of those stories which, en masse, do exactly that. And if the listmakers can identify the trend so thoroughly – if, despite all the individual qualifications, protests and contextualisations of the authors, these problems can still be said to exist – then the onus, however disconnected from the work of any one individual, nonetheless falls to those individuals, in their role as cultural creators, to acknowledge the problem; to do better next time; perhaps even to apologise. This last is a particular sticking point. By and large, human beings tend not to volunteer apologies for things they perceive to be the fault of other people, for the simple reason that apology connotes guilt, and how can we feel guilty – or rather, why should we – if we’re not the ones at fault? But while we might argue over who broke a vase, the vase itself is still broken, and will remain so, its shards ground into the carpet, until someone decides to clean it up.Blog Post: Love Team Freezer” - Foz Meadows
78. “If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.” - George Steiner
79. “To point out nonepistemic motives in another’s view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt upon a person’s connection to the world as it is.” - Sam Harris
80. “...like the emperor striding confidently along without clothes, convinced by them and their inward monitions that their criticism is effecting changes in society.” - Samuel Pickering
81. “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” - Neil Gaiman
82. “Critical voices have to care about history. We have to care about the way in which things get controlled in the past because that's when the damage gets done and if we don't keep that historical memory, we will allow them to do it again next time.” - Martin Baker
83. “People tend to criticize their spouse most loudly in the area where they themselves have the deepest emotional need.” - Gary Chapman
84. “Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.” - Fredric Jameson
85. “A critic is a legless man who teaches other people to run” - Channing Pollock
86. “I find it a challenge to cooperate in a society where it's considered moral to critique a résumé yet immoral to critique morality.” - Criss Jami
87. “Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.” - Fernando Pessoa
88. “Critique by creating.” - Michelangelo Buonarroti
89. “Surely it is the one who fears he is wrong who avoids criticism. The one who is sure he is right invites it. It only illuminates the strength of beliefs and makes them more available to others.” - David L. Wolfe
90. “To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)” - Steven Heighton
91. “The public talk -- and injuriously! -- Well! are you ignorant of the little importance of such talk? -- The public speak! -- It is not the world, it is only the despicable part of it -- only the ill-natured, who upon the smallest evidence pass rash judgements, and anticipate events, the wise wait for them and are silent.” - Joseph Boruwlaski
92. “I am my own biggest critic. Before anyone else has criticized me, I have already criticized myself. But for the rest of my life, I am going to be with me and I don't want to spend my life with someone who is always critical. So I am going to stop being my own critic. It's high time that I accept all the great things about me.” - C. JoyBell C.
93. “He only profits from praise who values criticism.” - Heinrich Heine
94. “All I’m arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there’s no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty—and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I’m telling you I arrived at it irrationally.” - Sam Harris
95. “Wenn wir uns der Verfolgung des freien Geistes während der Diktatur besinnen, werden wir die Freiheit jedes Gedankens und jeder Kritik schützen, so sehr sie sich auch gegen uns selbst richten mag."[Ansprache am 8. Mai 1985 in der Gedenkstunde im Plenarsaal des Deutschen Bundestages]” - Richard von Weizsäcker
96. “It's too easy to criticize a man when he's out of favour, and to make him shoulder the blame for everybody else's mistakes.” - Leo Tolstoy
97. “Who is the wrong person to criticise?You” - Idries Shah
98. “Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man's growth without destroying his roots.” - Frank Howard Clark
99. “Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its first and most obvious identifying sign” - John Gardner
100. “Who do you spend time with? Criticizers or encouragers? Surround yourself with those who believe in you. Your life is too important for anything less.” - Steve Goodier
101. “Because his [Damien Hirst] art is idea art - art drawn on the back of cigarette packets and beer mats, roughed out in airport departure lounges and the back of the taxis, usually delegated to and carried by others - this leaves Damien a lot of time for what might loosely be called socializing. Hanging around.” - Gordon Burn
102. “(Feedback) People become addicted to it. That’s why journalism is so popular, because you want to hear, every day, what people think of what you just wrote. I think a little patience on that front can be good, too.” - zadie smith
103. “After all, how many of our todays and of our tomorrows do we want to give our yesterdays? It is one thing to be victimized by another. It is quite another to victimize ourselves because we cannot learn from the past or forgive. Those who choose to live in the past, to live in the land of regret and complaint, do so at the sacrifice of their todays and their tomorrows.” - Dr John Lewis Lund
104. “Regarding Christians who feel they have a free pass on being criticized; When the blind worship of an invisible being and the doctrine of millennia-old texts written by ignorant men in another country becomes more important than real, present human beings, then the blind worshiper SHOULD be shunned and criticized. It would be unethical to respond otherwise.” - Kelli Jae Baeli
105. “One of the most valuable things one of my art teachers said to me was, ‘Don’t get upset by criticism. Value the fact that at least someone noticed what you did.” - Chris Ware
106. “Any writer who puts his words and thoughts out into the public is going to be criticized.” - Thomas Moore
107. “Anaemia is an illness primarily affecting characters in novels.” - Marchel Reich-Ranicki
108. “I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! more culture! read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God’s sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football matches, boredom navigating the Chilean imagination like an enormous aircraft carrier. And that’s the truth. We were bored. We intellectuals. Because you can't read all day and all night. You can't write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style...” - Roberto Bolaño
109. “You have to lift a person up before you can really put them in their place.” - Criss Jami
110. “Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer's habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.” - Ben Hecht
111. “It is peculiar to “ressentiment criticism” that it does not seriously desire that its demands be fulfilled. It does not want to cure the evil. The evil is merely the pretext for the criticism.” - Max Scheler
112. “Whenever convictions are not arrived at by direct contact with the world and the objects themselves, but indirectly through a critique of the opinions of others, the processes of thinking are impregnated with ressentiment. The establishment of “criteria” for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no “object” that has not stood the test of criticism” - Max Scheler
113. “Though in single life your joys may not be very many, your sorrows, at least will not be more than you can bear. Marriage may change your circumstances for the better, but in my private opinion, it is far more likely to produce a contrary result” - Anne Brontë
114. “Learn to be as analytical about things of which you are credulous as you are of those which you criticise.” - Idries Shah
115. “We shall, as we ripen in grace, have greater sweetness towards our fellow Christians. Bitter-spirited Christians may know a great deal, but they are immature. Those who are quick to censure may be very acute in judgment, but they are as yet very immature in heart. He who grows in grace remembers that he is but dust, and he therefore does not expect his fellow Christians to be anything more; he overlooks ten thousand of their faults, because he knows his God overlooks twenty thousand in his own case. He does not expect perfection in the creature, and, therefore, he is not disappointed when he does not find it. ... I know we who are young beginners in grace think ourselves qualified to reform the whole Christian church. We drag her before us, and condemn her straightway; but when our virtues become more mature, I trust we shall not be more tolerant of evil, but we shall be more tolerant of infirmity, more hopeful for the people of God, and certainly less arrogant in our criticisms.” - Charles H. Spurgeon
116. “How is he made? Oftentimes bitter, sometimes sweet, seldom even wide-awake, architectural criticism of "the modern" wholly lacks inspiration or any qualification because it lacks the appreciation that is love: the flame essential to profound understanding. Only as criticism is the fruit of such experience will it ever be able truly to appraise anything. Else the spirit of true criteria is lacking. That spirit is love and love alone can understand. So art criticism is usually sour and superficial today because it would seem to know all about everything but understand nothing. Usually the public prints afford no more than a kind of irresponsible journalese wholly dependent upon some form of comparison, commercialization or pseudo-personal opinion made public. Critics may have minds of their own, but what chance have they to use them when experience in creating the art they write about is rarely theirs? So whatever they may happen to learn, and you learn from them, is very likely to put over on both of you as it was put over on them. Truth is seldom in the critic; and either good or bad, what comes from him is seldom his. Current criticism is something to take always on suspicion, if taken at all.” - Frank Lloyd Wright
117. “I don't want to make people mad. I just... well, how can people get better if you don't tell them what you honestly think?” - Brandon Sanderson
118. “Excuses, criticisms, and superstitions are vitamins for haters, but poison for the successful. Rise above!” - Steve Maraboli
119. “Okay, let's put this another way―if what you're about to say wouldn't look good permanently engraved on your tombstone, bite your tongue.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
