Self Critic Quotes & Sayings

As an actor, you're constantly riddled with self-doubt. You are your own worst critic. — Michelle Fairley

When someone writes a book review, they obviously already self-identify as a writer. I mean, they are. They're writers, they're critics, and they're writing about a book about a writer who's a critic. So I think it's really hard for people to distance themselves from what they're criticizing. — Chuck Klosterman

Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place. — Joan Didion

Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether. — J.M. Coetzee

For the poor the whole world is a self-constituted critic; your smallest action is open to debate. No secret place of your soul is safe from invasion. — Alice Foote MacDougall

The field of creativity that exists within each individual is freed by moving out of ideas of wrong-doing or right-doing. If we can answer 'yes' to the question. 'Is my self-worth as strong as my self-critic?' then we are ready to engage our creative expression. — Angeles Arrien

The problem is that the inner critic is actually an indispensable element of any writer's working life; it is the immune system, the necessary resistance against the toxicity of bad writing. Excessive self-doubt is therefore like a sort of autoimmune disease, caused by an overactive and overpowerful inner critic: the cure becomes the condition. (Mark O'Connell NYTimes) — Patricia Costa Viglucci

But, as the ninth-century cultural critic Jahiz wrote, 'Some people who affect asceticism and self denial are uneasy and embarrassed when cunt, cock and fucking are mentioned but most men you find like that are without knowledge, honour, nobility or dignity.'2 I have certainly not played up these features of the narrative, — Hugh Kennedy

[A critic] can never forget that all he has to go by, finally, is his own response, the self that makes and is made up of such responses - and yet he must regard that self as no more than the instrument through which the work of art is seen, so that the work of art will seem everything to him and his own self nothing. — Randall Jarrell

If EXCELLENCE is one of your values, not only you self-critic and evaluate your performance consistently, you BEG others for honest feedback... — Assegid Habtewold

I'm a novelist, a critic, an essayist - I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It's a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self. — Walter Kirn

Criticism is poisonous...to others and to self..Ever heard of the statue of a CRITIC being erected for others to get inspired by ?? ...not in the history of mankind ! — Abha Maryada Banerjee

Talk to Yourself Like a Winner You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you. JAMES ALLEN Author of As a Man Thinketh So what if you could learn to always talk to yourself like a winner instead of a loser? What if you could transform your negative self-talk into positive self-talk? What if you could silence your thoughts of lack and limitation and replace them with thoughts of unlimited possibility? What if you could replace any victim language in your thoughts with the language of empowerment? And what if you could transform your inner critic, who judges your every move, into a supportive inner coach who would encourage you and give you confidence as you faced new situations and risks? Well ... all of that is possible with a little awareness, focus, and intention. — Jack Canfield

You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how 'creative', 'idealistic', and 'loving' it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. I fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the 'herd of the independent minds'. Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for 'love' was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence. — Roger Kimball

Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions - on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets - simply aren't up to scratch. — Will Self

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.

I suffer from low self-esteem. I had horrible self-esteem growing up. You really have to save yourself because the critic within you will eat you up. It's not the outside world - it's your interior life, that critic within you, that you have to silence. — Iman

Discernment is the son of good judgment and the father of self-control. When mixed with an already clear conscience, the ability to read the true motives of a critic keeps one's conscience both clear and at ease. — Criss Jami

The good news is that opportunities for love enter our lives unpredictably, whether or not we've perfected self-compassion or befriended our inner critic. — Sharon Salzberg

There is no magic. Harry Potter was probably the last one. There are no Harry Potters in politics. There are people who should be hard working, admit their mistakes - and we made a lot of mistakes - make an honest self-critic but change what we did wrong. What did we do wrong? We built a state which is big, which is corrupted, which is a state which should radically change. What is Mr Tsipras saying - keep it as it is, so everything that is old belongs to him. — Dora Bakoyannis

In the inner courtroom of my mind, mine is the only judgment that counts. — Nathaniel Branden

Behind every humorist who delights in knifing hypocrites is a major self-critic. — Wendy Aron

Your life experience is a moving picture, of which you are writer, director, performer, producer and critic. — T.F. Hodge

A worthy old scholar, criticising the king's penmanship, pointed out a fault. He, smiling, erased the word, but when the critic was gone, began to restore it, remarking that it was right, but it was better to spoil paper than the self-confidence of an old man. — Flora Annie Steel

I am continuously struck by how frequently the various thought processes of the inner critic trigger overwhelming emotional flashbacks. This is because the PTSD-derived inner critic weds shame and self-hate about imperfection to fear of abandonment, and mercilessly drive the psyche with the entwined serpents of perfectionism and endangerment. Recovering individuals must learn to recognize, confront and disidentify from the many inner critic processes that tumble them back in emotional time to the awful feelings of overwhelming fear, self-hate, hopelessness and self-disgust that were part and parcel of their original childhood abandonment. — Pete Walker

You call me the unhuman," it might say to him, "and so I really am - for you; but I am so only because you bring me into opposition to the human, and I could despise myself only so long as I let myself be hypnotized into this opposition. I was contemptible because I sought my 'better self' outside me; I was the unhuman because I dreamed of the 'human'; I resembled the pious who hunger for their 'true self' and always remain 'poor sinners'; I thought of myself only in comparison to another; enough, I was not all in all, was not - unique.[102] But now I cease to appear to myself as the unhuman, cease to measure myself and let myself be measured by man, cease to recognize anything above me: consequently - adieu, humane critic! I only have been the unhuman, am it now no longer, but am the unique, yes, to your loathing, the egoistic; yet not the egoistic as it lets itself be measured by the human, humane, and unselfish, but the egoistic as the - unique. — Max Stirner

That night I looked Stephanie [Burt] up online and started reading more about her work...I kept encountering a striking factoid...: she's often cited as the most influential poetry critic of her generation. And she's openly trans. This is not the world I was taught I would grow into when I was a young trans child -- the one where transgender people are heard, are brilliant, are influential, are even the best. At anything. Being trans, I'd learned subliminally, was supposed to keep you from being that -- even if you loved your trans self, and even if some other trans people and a few allies did too, the world at large would keep your potential tamped down."

- from "Surface Difficulty: An Adventure in Reading Trans Poetry," Original Plumbing Magazine 2014 — Mitch Kellaway

For the critic, criticism is a form of natural self-expression, as poetry is to the poet. So, for a critic, criticism is a true thing. Criticism isn't written for poets, it's written for other readers. One hopes it is true for other readers if it's true for oneself. — Helen Vendler

What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us
And urge us to futile activity,
And in the end, Judge us still more severely,
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us? — T. S. Eliot

Low self esteem results when the inner critic prevails. — Catherine Cardinal

Turn down the volume of your negative inner voice and create a nurturing inner voice to take it's place. When you make a mistake, forgive yourself, learn from it, and move on instead of obsessing about it. Equally important, don't allow anyone else to dwell on your mistakes or shortcomings or to expect perfection from you. — Beverly Engel