134 Insightful Criticism Quotes

In a world teeming with opinions and perspectives, insightful criticism serves as a beacon of understanding and growth. Whether it's navigating personal challenges, fostering creativity, or tackling societal issues, criticism—when delivered thoughtfully—can inspire transformation and enlightenment. This carefully curated collection of 134 quotes captures the essence of insightful criticism, offering a tapestry of wisdom from diverse voices and disciplines. Embark on a journey that celebrates the art of critique, and explore how these powerful words encourage reflection, inspire change, and deepen our comprehension of the world around us.

1. “I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” - Mark Twain

2. “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

3. “Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?” - Connie Willis

4. “Once in a golden hour I cast to earth a seed. Up there came a flower, The people said, a weed.” - Alfred Lord Tennyson

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

7. “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. ” - Susan Sontag

8. “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.” - Herman Melville

9. “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

10. “Bosch is great because what he imagines in color can be translated into justice.” - Edward Dahlberg

11. “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

12. “I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.” - Helen Keller

13. “No weakness of the human mind has more frequently incurred animadversion, than the negligence with which men overlook their own faults, however flagrant, and the easiness with which they pardon them, however frequently repeated.” - Samuel Johnson

14. “To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.” - Elbert Hubbard

15. “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

16. “Ah, but sir,' said Lascelles, 'it is precisely by passing judgments upon other people's work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your own opinions better. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one's own ends. One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the article one may develop one's theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body else does.” - Susanna Clarke

17. “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

18. “You sounded like Dolly parton on helium."(After kristy lee cook of season 7 on american idol,sang her country rendition of the Beatles'"Eight Days A Week.)” - Simon Cowell

19. “It was like orderin a hamburger and getting only the buns"(After Brooke White of season 7 on american idol sang the song 'Hero'by Mariah Carey)” - Simon Cowell

20. “I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.” - Georgia O'Keefe

21. “Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.” - Edith Sitwell

22. “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

23. “Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.” - Andy Warhol

24. “دعوة علماء الدين إلى أن يكونوا رسل الديمقراطية الإسلامية بالسعي لتعديل مابين طبقات الناس من الفروق الشاسعة” - مصطفى صبري

25. “There is a common tendency to turn off one's imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one can keep one's clear conscience and one's moral indignation unsullied.” - John Fraser

26. “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

27. “Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you’ve got a pretty neck” - Eli Wallach

28. “The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.” - G.K. Chesterton

29. “The necessity of reform mustn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: “Don’t criticize, since you’re not capable of carrying out a reform.” That’s ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, “this, then, is what needs to be done.” It should be an instrument for those for who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is.” - Michel Foucault

30. “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

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

32. “The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

33. “I criticize by creation, not by finding fault.” - Marcus Tullius Cicero

34. “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

35. “Now that I think about it, it seems to me that’s what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua.” - Julio Cortazar

36. “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

37. “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

38. “That was excellently observed’, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.” - Jonathan Swift

39. “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

40. “This is what is known as perspective, and it is a swindle.” - Kurt Schwitters

41. “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

42. “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

43. “If we wear our worst reviews like a backpack, they travel with us.” - Jennifer Love Hewitt

44. “Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,- criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led, - this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society” - W.E.B. Du Bois

45. “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

46. “The pleasure of criticizing takes away from us the pleasure of being moved by some very fine things.” - Jean de La Bruyère

47. “On Art Garfunkel - He makes Paul Simon look like LL Cool J.” - Ian Gittins

48. “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

49. “People quickly grow accustomed to being the slaves of mystery.” - Guillaume Apollinaire

50. “It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in it's place is a work extremely troublesome.” - Plutarch

51. “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

52. “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

53. “Don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.” - Abraham Lincoln

54. “Don’t criticize what you don’t understand, son. You never walked in that man’s shoes.” - Elvis Presley

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “You'd challenge me and lose. You know it, I know it, but you'd still do it. Sometimes your sense of honor confuses the hell out of me.” - Seanan McGuire

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. “If you say something and reject any criticism, then your words truly meant to advise yourself.” - Toba Beta

62. “She turned to examine Dr. Breed, looking at him with helpless reproach. She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.” - Kurt Vonnegut

63. “Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible.” - Bart Ehrman

64. “When virtues are pointed out first, flaws seem less insurmountable.” - Judith Martin

65. “A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.” - C.S. Lewis

66. “[The critic] serves up his erudition in strong doses; he pours out all the knowledge he got up the day before in some library or other, and treats in heathenish fashion people at whose feet he ought to sit, and the most ignorant of whom could give points to much wiser men than he.Authors bear this sort of thing with a magnanimity and a patience that are really incomprehensible. For, after all, who are those critics, who with their trenchant tone, their dicta, might be supposed sons of the gods? They are simply fellows who were at college with us, and who have turned their studies to less account, since they have not produced anything, and can do no more than soil and spoil the works of others, like true stymphalid vampires.” - Théophile Gautier

67. “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

68. “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

69. “If you are ever called upon to chasten a person, never chasten beyond the balm you have within you to bind up.” - Brigham Young

70. “If we judge ourselves only by our aspirations and everyone else only their conduct we shall soon reach a very false conclusion.” - Calvin Coolidge

71. “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

72. “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

73. “As Henry Dan Piper, one of Fitzgerald's most perceptive critics, has commented, his fiction heroes "are destroyed because they attempt to fulfill themselves through their social relationships. They cannot distinguish between social values like popularity, charm, and success, and the more lasting moral values." Their creator did make that distinction, however, and so was constantly surrounding his characters with a mist of admiration and then blowing it away.” - Scott Donaldson

74. “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

75. “His forward voice now is to speak well of his friend. His backward voice is to utter foul speeches and to detract.” - William Shakespeare

76. “History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.” - James Fenimore Cooper

77. “Domination and critique have always formed an apparatus covertly against a common hostis: the conspirator, who works under cover, who used everything THEY give him and everything THEY attribute to him as a mask. The conspirator is everywhere hated, although THEY will never hate him as much as he enjoys playing his game. No doubt a certain amount of what one usually calls “perversion” accounts for the pleasure, since what he enjoys, among other things, is his opacity. But that isn’t the reason THEY continue to push the conspirator to make himself a critic, to subjectivate himself as critic, nor the reason for the hate THEY so commonly express. The reason is quite simply the danger he represents. The danger, for Empire, is war machines: that one person, that people transform themselves into war machines, ORGANICALLY JOIN THEIR TASTE FOR LIFE AND THEIR TASTE FOR DESTRUCTION.” - Tiqqun

78. “These days when Christians bicker they exaggerate passion into a legalistic belief and prosperity into a lukewarm belief.” - Criss Jami

79. “The devil's happy when the critics run you off.” - Criss Jami

80. “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

81. “As a matter of fact, we are none of us above criticism; so let us bear with each other's faults.” - L. Frank Baum

82. “In the past few years, more and more passionate debates about the nature of SFF and YA have bubbled to the surface. Conversations about race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, romance, bias, originality, feminism and cultural appropriation are getting louder and louder and, consequently, harder to ignore. Similarly, this current tension about negative reviews is just another fissure in the same bedrock: the consequence of built-up pressure beneath. Literary authors feud with each other, and famously; yet genre authors do not, because we fear being cast as turncoats. For decades, literary writers have also worked publicly as literary reviewers; yet SFF and YA authors fear to do the same, lest it be seen as backstabbing when they dislike a book. (Small wonder, then, that so few SFF and YA titles are reviewed by mainstream journals.) Just as a culture of sexual repression leads to feelings of guilt and outbursts of sexual moralising by those most afflicted, so have we, by denying and decrying all criticism that doesn’t suit our purposes, turned those selfsame critical impulses towards censorship.Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA” - Foz Meadows

83. “Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation--who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him--but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope--qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning.” - Bill Styron

84. “...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

85. “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

86. “I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.” - Johannes Kepler

87. “The Author To Her BookThou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,Who after birth did'st by my side remain,Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true,Who thee abroad exposed to public view,Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).At thy return my blushing was not small,My rambling brat (in print) should mother call.I cast thee by as one unfit for light,The visage was so irksome in my sight,Yet being mine own, at length affection wouldThy blemishes amend, if so I could.I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet,Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet.In better dress to trim thee was my mind,But nought save home-spun cloth, i' th' house I find.In this array, 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam.In critic's hands, beware thou dost not come,And take thy way where yet thou art not known.If for thy father askt, say, thou hadst none;And for thy mother, she alas is poor,Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.” - Anne Bradstreet

88. “Don't think for a minute that bad publicity and endless criticism don't leave their claw marks on everyone concerned. Your friends try to cheer you up by saying lightly, "I suppose you get used to it, and ignore it." You try. You try damned hard. But you never get used to it. It always wounds and hurts.” - Ava Gardner

89. “Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. The trouble is that very few of their laborious explanations stick in the memory. The mind drops them as a branch drops its overripe fruit. ... Again and again I ask impatiently, "Why concern myself with these explanations and hypotheses?" They fly hither and thither in my thought like blind birds beating the air with ineffectual wings. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.” - Helen Keller

90. “A critic is a legless man who teaches other people to run” - Channing Pollock

91. “Critique by creating.” - Michelangelo Buonarroti

92. “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

93. “I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.” - Carlos Fuentes

94. “An acquaintance merely enjoys your company, a fair-weather companion flatters when all is well, a true friend has your best interests at heart and the pluck to tell you what you need to hear.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

95. “He only profits from praise who values criticism.” - Heinrich Heine

96. “He's the President—it's the responsibility of every citizen to criticize aggressively when they think it's warranted.” - Glenn Greenwald

97. “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

98. “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

99. “Often those that criticise others reveal what he himself lacks.” - Shannon L. Alder

100. “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

101. “The irony of Christianity is that believers get so angry, and self righteous toward other Christians who sin differently than they do. Christianity is like one large fraternity where brother and sisterhood is tested by hazing.” - Shannon L. Alder

102. “Who is the wrong person to criticise?You” - Idries Shah

103. “Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man's growth without destroying his roots.” - Frank Howard Clark

104. “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

105. “Nothing ruins a good thing quite like knowing you share your opinions with mindless little tits.” - Yahtzee Croshaw

106. “Richard Wright, a Mississippi-born negro, has written a blinding and corrosive study in hate. It is a novel entitled "Native Son".” - David L. Cohn

107. “The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)” - C.S. Lewis

108. “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

109. “When you lay down a proposition which is forthwith controverted, it is of course optional with you to take up the cudgels in its defence. If you are deeply convinced of its truth, you will perhaps be content to leave it to take care of itself; or, at all events, you will not go out of your way to push its fortunes; for you will reflect that in the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons. In the long run, we say; it will meanwhile cost you an occasional pang to see your cherished theory turned into a football by the critics. A football is not, as such, a very respectable object, and the more numerous the players, the more ridiculous it becomes. Unless, therefore, you are very confident of your ability to rescue it from the chaos of kicks, you will best consult its interests by not mingling in the game.” - Henry James

110. “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

111. “I have tonight begun reading a stupid, shitty book by Kerouac called Big Sur, and I would give a ball to wake up tomorrow on some empty ridge with a herd of beatniks grazing in the clearing about 200 yards below the house. And then to squat with the big boomer and feel it on my shoulder with the smell of grease and powder and, later, a little blood.” - Hunter S. Thompson

112. “It shows a mediocre architect at the top of his game [on the Beetham Tower in Manchester]” - Owen Hatherley

113. “If yourhands are tied towardsanyone who's in need ofa helping hand, let yourtangue also be tied” - Nathanael Kanyinga

114. “This has been done by masters of the trade and Garcia had taken in every stock situation with amazing powers of retention, but he had not put things together right and had used extraordinary discernment in not adding one single touch of originality.” - Felipe Alfau

115. “If you find yourself criticizing other people, your probably doing it out of Resistance. When we see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived out our own.Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others. if they speak at all, it is to offer encouragement. Watch yourself. Of all the manifestations of Resistance, most only harm ourselves. Criticism and cruelty harm others as well.” - Stephen Pressfield

116. “There are those who see film and take it seriously as an artistic medium, and others who go to have a good time, to simply be entertained. I have to be careful , because it sounds like I am condemning, or criticizing what people are doing. I have nothing against that, in the same way that some people like rock music or to go dancing, and other people like to go to a Beethoven concert. It's just that I'm more interested in the one than the other.” - Michael Haneke

117. “This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.” - Susan Sontag

118. “To call you my critic is to call you my friend.” - Karen E. Quinones Miller

119. “[A] writer’s most powerful weapon, his true strength, was his intuition, and regardless of whether he had any talent, if the critics combined to discredit an author’s nose for things, he would be reduced to a fearful creature who took a mistakenly guarded, absurdly cautious approach to his work, which would end up stifling his latent genius.” - Félix J. Palma

120. “A leader is always first in line during times of criticism and last in line during times of recognition.” - Orrin Woodward

121. “...when people oppose your view, you can become a lightning rod, but if I were you, I'd let them stew...” - John Geddes

122. “If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?” - E.A. Bucchianeri

123. “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

124. “The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

125. “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

126. “Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "radical" and that which is a kind of literary analogy to the Letterman show. It's not that there is pop culture around, it's that so few people can see the difference between it and high culture, if you will. Morton Feldman is not Stephen Sondheim. The latter is a wonderful what-he-is, but he is not what-he-is-not. To pretend that he is is to insult Feldman and embarrass Sondheim, to enact a process of homogenization that is something like pretending that David Mamet, say, breathes the same air as Samuel Beckett. People used to understand that there is, at any given time, a handful of superb writers or painters or whatever--and then there are all the rest. Nothing wrong with that. But it now makes people very uncomfortable, very edgy, as if the very idea of a Matisse or a Charles Ives or a Thelonious Monk is an affront to the notion of "ain't everything just great!" We have the spectacle of perfectly nice, respectable, harmless writers, etc., being accorded the status of important artists...Essentially the serious novelist should do what s/he can do and simply forgo the idea of a substantial audience.” - Gilbert Sorrentino

127. “Learn to be as analytical about things of which you are credulous as you are of those which you criticise.” - Idries Shah

128. “I want to say to the literature teacher who remains wilfully, even boastfully ignorant of a major element of contemporary fiction: you are incompetent to teach or judge your subject. Readers and students who do know the field, meanwhile, have every right to challenge your ignorant prejudice. Rise, undergraduates of the English departments! You have nothing to lose but your A on the midterm!” - Ursula K. Le Guin

129. “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

130. “Es gibt Menschen, die es zeitlebens einem Bettler nachtragen, daß sie ihm nichts gegeben haben.” - Karl Kraus

131. “I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism.” - Charles Schwab

132. “Easy to be a critic; hard to be a quarterback.” - T. Scott McLeod

133. “Excuses, criticisms, and superstitions are vitamins for haters, but poison for the successful. Rise above!” - Steve Maraboli

134. “Had she any respect for him at all, his words would've affected her. But no value accompanies comments spewed from the mouth of a brute.” - Richelle E. Goodrich