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 they’re not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It’s a key part of invention.

EQUAL RIGHTS and FREE DISCUSSION will be fearlessly advocated and maintained. Sectarian dogmas or tenets will be investigated and compared.

Where people are not present, talking about them is either lie or ridiculous.

Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

Do not fear criticism, accept it as an inspiration for boldness and action

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...

Write it as easy as you think about the difficulty

The writers in the newspapers could sounds smart because they did not have the responsibilities of decision, and they could sound bold by enunciating positions which they were not required to implement.

When people give one star ratings, they seem to be trying to make a point. In my opinion, one star ratings don’t make a constructive point. They are just unfair put downs to creativity.

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics.

He?s facing a potentially divisive primary, and most of the criticism he?s taking is from Democrats. He?s sided with Bush as much as he can. Iraq is enough. And he?s got to go out of his way to show Democrats that he?s a legitimate Democrat worthy of their support. That?s all this is, and it...

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.

Criticize me if you can, but that won’t stop me from saying what i like, my mouth is mine, and not yours.

To most of the general public, language comes down less to wonder than a rather censorious bifurcated sentiment – namely, that the vast majority of the world’s humans either speak and something primitive or speak something badly.

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.

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.

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,...

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.

Criticism can be devastating. When push comes to shove, we are all very sensitive.

It is not my methodology to engage too much with critics for many reasons:- I honestly believe that my ego is not worthy of my having to defend it. There are far more important things in the ummah than me having to respond to critics.- By and large, criticism is a part of human life...

Being overly critical of yourself is like having a relentless, inescapable bully who follows you everywhere you go and abuses you.

People quick to criticize others, but won’t shine the light on themselves. You can’t always judge a book by the outside appearance. You have to open it up and read in order to discover how precious it is.

Bosch is great because what he imagines in color can be translated into justice.

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...

…some people become hypercritical when stressed.Then again, he hadn’t been stressed last week. She giggled, remembering how he’d instructed her on the proper way to fold hand towels. Talk about nitpicky. Perhaps this would be a good time to call it quits.

In criticism, I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.

The truth is it can be a tremendous opportunity. You prove to the organization you can take criticism and you’re able to turn it around. That’s a very positive career statement.

Fear cannot capture us, criticism cannot harm us, and pride cannot make us fall.

A critic must be knowledgeable in several fields, practices, and mediums. Brushing off art that they personally don’t understand, is not a critique.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

When did most of us stop being poets?

Opinions of the masses kill the ‘extra’ in an ‘extraordinary’ idea.

Be warned: A person content to sit with you and criticize others will speak critically of you out of earshot.

Neither the student nor I would mind in the least fair criticism and correction, but no one will permit himself to suffer criticism and correction from another whose knowledge and understanding of the subject is less than the one criticized and corrected; whose knowledge and understanding of the subject is susceptible to doubt as to...

what do you want for nothing?” The buyer does not waive his right to express his opinion.”[Thick Skin and Bad Reviews, Blog post, June 26, 2013]

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...

You have to laugh, you have to be able to take criticism.

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 consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies...

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 know as much of political life as I know of navigation. (P. 56)

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. And it has been wisely said that the man who knows only half of any question is worse off than...

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.