Quotes About Self-worth

If I'm ever going to be okay, I'll have to earn it.

somewhere in his murkiest depths, he wasn't so much afraid of being left again as condemning someone else to second best.

They walked on in silence for a while, until Rudy said, "I just wish I was like Jesse Owens, Papa." This time, Mr. Steiner placed his hand on Rudy's head and explained, "I know, son—but you've got beautiful blond hair and big, safe blue eyes. You should be happy with that; is that clear?" But nothing was clear.

One of the things about equality is not just that you be treated equally to a man, but that you treat yourself equally to the way you treat a man.

One of the things about equality is not that you be treated equally to a man, butthat you treat yourself equally to the way you treat a man.

Don't allow anybody to make you feel that you're nobody.

and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky...

The Negro became, in his own estimation, the equal of any man. In the summer of 1963, the Negroes of America wrote an emancipation proclamation to themselves. They shook off three hundred years of psychological slavery and said: "We can make ourselves free." The old order ends, no matter what Bastilles remain, when the enslaved, within themselves, bury the psychology of servitude. This is what happened last year in the unseen chambers of millions of minds.

Changes made to please others are unrealistic, but more important, they're unfair to you.

I do beg you to have some regard for my pride. A million years? I assure you I would stop asking after the first thousand.

Why did people assume that the beautiful among them needed nothing but their beauty to bring them happiness? That behind the beauty there was nothing but an empty shell, insensitive shell?

Why do I want to run from happiness?

It is that the chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.

Subestimarse es algo tan alejado de la verdad como exagerar las propias facultades.

Populus me sibilat at mihi plaudo Ipse domi simul ac nummos contemplor in arca. (The public hisses at me, but I applaud myself in my own house, and simultaneously contemplate the money in my chest.)

I'm sure there are a great many things I don't know about these women in their splendid dresses, but I often have the feeling that without their wealthy husbands or boyfriends, many of them would be struggling to get by and might not bare the same proud opinions of themselves. And of course, the same thing is true for a first-class Geisha.

ich so sehr eine Konkurrenz für Dich, wie eine Pfütze als Meer gilt

That's the only thing that matters, honey, for someone to see more in you than you thought there was to see.

We are unhappy because we think that love is something we require from someone else.

That, darling, is the only thing that counts for someone to see more in you than you ever imagined was there.

To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one's own conscience is to abandon mankind. History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience.

Pop, I'm nothing! I'm nothing, Pop. Can't you understand that? There's no spite in it any more. I'm just what I am, that's all.

I get here, and I don't know what to do with myself. I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life

If personal meaning, in this cheer leader society, lies in success, then failure must threaten identity itself.