Quotes About Self-esteem

Finding within yourself a sense of value that does not depend on your achievements will make you more resistant to crippling self-doubts.

Every potato chip I've have ever eaten has added another chip to my shoulder. They're a lot heavier to carry around than the pounds, somehow.

My mom used to tell me: 'It's not what you weigh it's what you look like.'

Such a negative emotional climate makes you feel dark, heavy, negative, and needy, like a black hole. It also affects how you appear to others: You don't smile much, you don't make eye contact, and you keep to yourself. It's like being painted black and makes you almost invisible to others.

I believe that my clothes can give people a better image of themselves - that it can increase their feelings of confidence and happiness.

You're fond, I imagine of your right eye? I mean, you've gone to the trouble of putting make up on it.

Please stop teaching my children that everyone gets a trophy just for participating. What is this, the Nobel Prize? Not everybody gets a trophy.

Sometimes the hardest part of the journey is believing you're worthy of the trip.

The guy with the biggest stomach will be the first to take off his shirt at a baseball game.

By contrast to the above views, people with self-esteem believe they are neither more or less than human. Knowing their faults and rough edges, they still are deeply and quietly glad to be who they are (Briggs 1977). They are like the good friend who knows you well and likes you anyway because they recognize the goodness, excellence, and potential that coexist alongside imperfections.

Self-awareness, the basic sense of self, and implicit memory (discussed below). To a great degree, self-esteem is imprinted as a felt sense in the right brain by the first three years, and stored implicitly below conscious awareness (Wilkinson 2010). Such imprints are usually not responsive to logic or words.

Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it

No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.

I've learned from these events that self-esteem plays as much a part in the destiny of nations as it does in the lives of individuals; that self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated; that citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform their countries; in short, that self-esteem is the basis of any real democracy.

The idea that women are 'our own worst enemies' forces us to admit that we don't have the power to be, even if we wanted too.

As always, self-esteem had created an ability to be generous.

Your problem is that you should like yourself better." Of course, he was right—but how could she like herself when she felt she had no self ?

If feminism means anything, it means taking responsibility for ourselves: for our own lives and actions. It is not "women as victims" but women refusing to be victims. What we need, as adults or children, is just one person who has confidence in us, so we can have confidence in ourselves.

I began to understand that self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it.

The ultimate in parallel thinking is the Golden Rule—providing it is read both ways. The traditional sequence assumes a healthy self-esteem and asks for empathy: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." But for many people whose self-esteem has been suppressed, the revolution lies in reversing it: Do unto yourself as you would do unto others.

Everytime a woman looks in a mirror and criticizes her body, a girl is watching.

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one. Yet one of the strongest, most thoughtful feminists I know still hides in one-piece bathing suits to conceal her two Cesarean scars. And one of the most hypocritical feminists I know (that is, one who loves feminism but dislikes women) had plastic surgery to remove the tiny scar that gave her face character.

No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down with every year of higher education. We've been studying our own absence.

Looking at Barbados and Australia as relatively positive examples, one societal hallmark of self-esteem seems to be an ability to both give and demand fairness, an expectation that extends from the personal to the political.