Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.

Do not wish to seem very devout nor more humble than need be, lest you seek glory by shunning it. For many, who screen from all men's sight their poverty, charity, and fasting, desire to excite admiration by their very disdain of it, and strangely seek for praise while they profess to keep out of its way.

Praise undeserved is satire in disguise/

...no matter how avid they themselves may be for praise and appreciation, people are often niggardly in giving it to others, however merited it is.

Beware of those who criticize you when you deserve some praise for an achievement, for it is they who secretly desire to be worshiped.

Just being alive is such a gift, but nobody ever told you to be thankful to existence. On the contrary, everyone was grumpy, complaining. Naturally, if everything surrounding your life from the very beginning goes on pointing out to you that you are not what you should be, goes on giving you great ideals that you have to follow and you have to become, your isness is never praised. What is praised is your future - if you can become someone respectable, powerful, rich, intellectual, in some way famous, not just a nobody.

If you are praised by others, be skeptical of yourself.

Le refus des louanges est un désir d'être loué deux fois.

Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad, for any other goodness is usually merely inertia or lack of will-power

If you are praised by others, be skeptical of yourself. For it is no easy feat to hold onto your inner harmony while collecting accolades. When grasping for one, you are likely to drop the other.

Refuse to accept partial completeness.

praise publicly, but criticize privately.

The myths and folktales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest. The future is regarded not in terms of an unremitting series of deaths and births, but as though one's own present system of ideals, virtues, goals, and advantages were to be fixed and made secure.

If one is actually a certain way and yet refuses to acknowledge it when called by that name, one is harmed not once but twice.