If you are ever called upon to chasten a person, never chasten beyond the balm you have within you to bind up.
Yeah, whatever you try to build or create - be it a poem, or a new skill, or a new relationship -- you will find yourself immediately surrounded by non-creators who trash it.
As long as they never produce anything, their work will forever be perfect and beyond reproach.
When we say anything bad about the leaders of the Church, whether true or false, we tend to impair their influence and their usefulness and are thus working against the Lord and his cause.
We live in a society that feeds on criticism. Faultfinding is the substance of columnists and commentators, and there is too much of this among our own people. It is so easy to find fault, and to resist doing so requires much of discipline. But if as a people we will build and sustain one another, the Lord will bless us with the strength to weather every storm and continue to move forward through every adversity.
Let us remember too that the further out of line or out of tune we ourselves are, the more we are inclined to look for error or weaknesses in others and to try to rationalize and justify our own faults rather than to try to improve ourselves.
Almost invariably, we find that the greatest criticism of Church leaders and doctrine comes from those who are not doing their full duty, following the leaders, or living according to the teachings of the gospel.
Let us look for the good rather than try to discover any hidden evil. We can easily find fault in others if that is what we are looking for.
Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
When you are screwing up and nobody says anything to you, that means they have given up on you.
The fault is in the one who blames. Spirit sees nothing to criticize.
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.
The problem with being a professional critic is that you end up consuming so much culture that you stop processing it like a normal person.
But when critics lose sight of why most people consume culture, they start missing what makes most things popular. In their search for significance, they forget about the fun.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
I'm not sure why we are able to diagnose and recommend remedies for other people’s ills so well, while we often have difficulty seeing our own.
Criticism is prejudice made plausible.
If you are ever called upon to chasten a person, never chasten beyond the balm you have within you to bind up.
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