"Being hated by fools is the price you pay for not being one of them."
It's everywhere online, credited to Cocteau, the Buddha and Kalam more or less interchangeably. Nobody can source it to any of them.
What Jean Cocteau did say is better. "What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you." The viral line asks you to endure the disapproval. Cocteau's hands you a map.
Emerson got somewhere similar first — "to be great is to be misunderstood." The people who push back often can't see what you see, and that cost comes with thinking differently.
So there are two instructions here, and the popular one is the weaker. Endure, yes: disapproval arrives whenever you decline to follow the crowd. But also read the list. Too different, too direct, too idealistic, too ambitious, too sensitive — the criticism is a compass, and it keeps pointing at the same place.
Don't just pay the bill. Read it.
Whatever keeps drawing criticism is usually the part of you that isn't borrowed.