Selected self perception quotes

1. What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

2. I don't think that we necessarily lie. I mean, we make our living by pretending that we're someone else. I don't tell tall tales. I always tell the truth.

3. I'm odd looking. Sometimes I think I look like a funny muppet.

4. Unlike most other people, I'm just an average person.

5. They laughed at Edison and Einstein, but somehow I still feel uncomfortable when they laugh at me.

6. It's hard enough to be alive and human, without the additional burden of being me.

7. I too am a member of the human race, (but admittedly not a very active member).

8. No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.

9. We see time's furrows on another's brow, And death intrench'd, preparing his assault; How few themselves in that just mirror see!

10. To overestimate the originality of one's thoughts is perhaps a less serious defect than being unaware of their newness. There is a more pronounced lack of sensitivity in underestimating (ourselves and others) than in overestimating.

11. The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

12. It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himself.

13. I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive. No man can, or, if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him.

14. I feel coming on a strange disease - humility.

15. I'd like to be taller. I'd like my baby fat to leave.

16. It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.

17. I have been known as a crank, faddist, madman. Evidently the reputation is well deserved. For wherever I go, I draw to myself cranks, faddists, and madmen.

18. I used to refer to myself as Typhoid Mary. It wasn't that I was jinxed, I just seemed to bring ill fortune to anybody I was close to.

19. I'm black, I don't feel burdened by it and I don't think it's a huge responsibility. It's part of who I am. It does not define me.

20. Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

21. The Vedanta recognizes no sin it only recognizes error. And the greatest error, says the Vedanta is to say that you are weak, that you are a sinner, a miserable creature, and that you have no power and you cannot do this and that.

22. Regard yourself all the more as a sinner because you cannot feel yourself to be what you are.

23. The easiest thing to do, whenever you fail, is to put yourself down by blaming your lack of ability for your misfortunes.

24. Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world, and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting.

25. My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

26. We will act consistently with our view of who we truly are, whether that view is accurate or not.

27. Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success.

28. Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

29. Part of me suspects that I'm a loser and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.

30. Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.

31. The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me.

32. Man is so made that if he is told often enough that he is a fool he believes it. (535)

33. The awareness of their individual blemishes and shortcomings inclines the frustrated to detect ill will and meanness in their fellow men. Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.

34. The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves. It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world.

35. I'm the master of low expectations... I'm also not very analytical. You know I don't spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things.

36. But there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense.

37. He [Finny] had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he.

38. I'm very mature for my age, but I'm also innocent in a lot of ways. I'm complicated.

39. Ugly. Is irrelevant. It is an immeasurable insult to a woman, and then supposedly the worst crime you can commit as a woman. But ugly, as beautiful, is an illusion. A matter of taste, a whim, an eye, a beholder, an opinion, a spin, light crossing the frame, paint, projection. The moment. Context.

40. With fame, you know, you can read about yourself, and somebody else's ideas about you, but what's important is how you feel about yourself - for survival and living day to day with what comes up.

41. L'amour-propre est le plus grand de tous les flatteurs.

42. Prae aliis itaque Britanniae scriptoribus, solus mihi Gildas...imitabilis esse videtur.

43. A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man.... It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

44. Heine says that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility, and that man is bound to lie about himself.

45. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

46. Da stehe ich nun, ich armer Thor! Und bin so klug als wie zuvor.

47. Say nothing good of yourself, you will be distrusted; say nothing bad of yourself, you will be taken at your word.

48. I'm like a junky without an addiction.

49. Insanity - to have to construct a picture of one's life, by making inquiries of others.

50. Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed ... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went.

51. When stripped, I looked less like 'Il David' than a plucked chicken that died of myxomatosis.

52. Of all things, good sense is the most fairly distributed: everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect never desire more of it than they already have.

53. Variants: Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, for everybody thinks he is so well supplied with it, that even those most difficult to please in all other matters never desire more of it than they already possess. Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have. Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.

54. [Style is] that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

55. Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is - nor yet so good a Christian.

56. She was beautiful, with a beauty so severe and so solitary that at first it was startling. 'Ah! If only there were two of me,' she thought, 'one doing the talking and one listening, one living and one watching, how I would love myself. I'd envy no one.'

57. I'm never afraid. But in my case it's nothing to be proud of.

58. But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quiet continuously a sense of their existence and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom? An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know. All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was! - that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.