When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, ‘Are they right?’ And if they are, you need to adapt what they’re doing. If they’re not right, if you really have conviction that...

If everybody likes you, you are doing it wrong.

Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And...

Mega biblion, mega kakon (Big book, big evil)

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?

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.

And if I am further pressed to declare straightforwardly whether I mean to disparage these authorities [who criticize Ibsen], I reply, pointedly, that I do. I affirm that such criticisms are written by men who...

The hard part about one being tough yet meek is the illusion of being a punching bag.

Don’t deceive yourself; laughing at someone’s weakness is not the way to reveal your strength. Your strength is in the help you offer, not the mockeries you deliver!

Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you’ve got a pretty neck

The man who cannot listen to an argument which opposes his views either has a weak position or is a weak defender of it. No opinion that cannot stand discussion or criticism is worth holding....

Hem,’ he said, and I knew he was a critic now, since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end.

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.

Let them lambaste a million, they won’t bring the crown of victor down on the ground

Their is no defense against criticism except obscurity.

Not everybody that says that you suck is a hater. There are people who suck.

Before publication, and if provided by persons whose judgment you trust, yes, of course criticism helps. But after something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise.

Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is...

Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn’t be prepared to make for other people.

Feminism’s failings do not mean we should eschew feminism entirely. People do terrible things all the time, but we don’t regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. We should disavow the failures of...

What someone else thinks of you is not what you have to think of yourself.

There is no point of relaying statistics on rape because for every figure given there are thousands missing, unreported. It is a shameful state we have created where a victim chooses to endure the pain...

His conception of the universe is, however, instinctive, not intellectual; it can’t be criticized as a concept, because there’s none there, and it can’t be criticized as temperament, because temperament can’t be criticized.

No-one ever built a statue of a critic.

These days when Christians bicker they exaggerate passion into a legalistic belief and prosperity into a lukewarm belief.

Our critics make us strong!Our fears make us bold!Our haters make us wise!Our foes make us active!Our obstacles make us passionate!Our losses make us wealthy!Our disappointments make us appointed!Our unseen treasures give us aknown peace!Whatever...

Learn to be as analytical about things of which you are credulous as you are of those which you criticise.

We’re all generous, but with different things, like time, money, talent — criticism.

[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...

The criticism by China is groundless. What we are doing has nothing to do with changing the status quo.

One Accuracy about criticism is that you don’t ask for it but it’s given to you. How you deal with it? Says a lot about you. People may criticize you for many reasons. You can’t...

The last time we did this there was some criticism on our procedure. It wasn’t the selection. I want to make that very clear. It was the way we handled ourselves on the logistics of...

Like so many of his successors in the language-crank world today, though, (Jonathan) Swift not only loathes (the) banal and common change (language); he ascribes it to moral failing.

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.

I believe in criticism.

Critics! Appalled I ventured on the name.Those cutthroat bandits in the paths of fame.

When they first emerged in their present shape around the turn of the 18th century, the so-called humane disciplines had a crucial social role. It was to foster and protect the kind of values for...

I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, “If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don’t, you won’t be able to understand your own...

Even if you do nothing, say nothing and be nothing, there will still be many who will criticize you. It is much better to be criticized for success than be condemned for failures because success...

Criticism involves taking a position, Mr. Day. How long has it been since you took a considered position on anything important?

Don’t take criticism personally; take from it what’s useful. Apply it and move on to something better.

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.

And against whom is this censorship directed? By way of answer, think back to the big subcultural debates of 2011 – debates about how gritty fantasy isn’t really fantasy; how epic fantasy written from the...

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...

The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

You’re afraid of criticism,’ she says. ‘But criticism is a sign of life! You know who doesn’t get criticized? Nonentities! Only the dead escape criticism.

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...

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...

object” that has not stood the test of criticism

They lost Olivia at Newport Beach. The panic made Alice hyperventilate. You were meant to be watching her, Nick kept saying. As if that were the point. That Alice had made a mistake. Not that...