Quotes on Criticism

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's 'mature' critics often are.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

My wife and I, unlike many intellectuals, spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.

Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.

Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.

The covers of this book are too far apart.

Nobody says, 'Yeah, I'd like to set myself up for some serious criticism!' And yet, the only way to be remarkable is to do just that.

In the spiritual domain, criticism is love turned sour. In a wholesome spiritual life there is no room for criticism. The critical faculty is an intellectual one, not a moral one. If criticism becomes a habit it will destroy the moral energy of the life and paralyse spiritual force. The only person who can criticise human beings is the Holy Spirit.

The best way to avoid criticism is never do anything ever. Or, do what you love, have a great life & let others spend their time criticising.

Whoever stubbornly refuses to accept criticism will suddenly be broken beyond repair.

It is the mark of a superior person that, left to themselves they are able endlessly to amuse, interest and entertain themselves out of their personal stock of meditations, ideas, criticisms, memories, philosophy, humor and what not.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

I was amplifying the negative at the expense of the positive, not to serve any useful function, not to make my writing better, but to destroy it. The lizard brain, so attuned to people laughing behind our backs, was on high alert for this sort of criticism and would do anything it could to stop me from writing again. I haven't sought out and read a review or a tweet since.

I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.

You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.

No one has the right to criticize you for how your body looks, but they will. One thing I've learned from experiencing this exact kind of criticism is that no one else can label your body except for you. No one gets to have a place in your mind if they weren't invited there by you. So please do me this one favor: Don't let their ugly words into your beautiful mind.

There are few circumstances which so strongly distinguish the philosopher, as the calmness with which he can reply to criticisms he may think undeservedly severe.

Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes them strive to justify themselves. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person's precious pride, hurts their sense of importance, and arouses resentment.

The most tragic consequence of our criticism of a man is to block his way to humiliation and grace, precisely to drive him into the mechanisms of self justification and into his faults instead of freeing him from them. For him, our voice drowns the voice of God.