Quotes About Self-perception

It's only when a man doesn't feel that he's a man that he has to be a god.

There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.

Mothers support certain illusions about their children, and one of my illusions was that I liked who I was, because she did. When she passed away, so did that idea.

Children forget that sometimes. They think of themselves as a burden instead of a wish granted.

It's never hard to act ordinary if you feel ordinary.

I thought you were a narcissist. Koppel burst into laughter. I'm too ugly to be a narcissist, he said.

It's the same for women not being thin enough, or men not being rich enough. It's just what our culture would have you believe. Don't believe it.

So," she said, moving away, "now you know how badly someone wanted you, Charley. Children forget that sometimes. They think of themselves as a burden instead of a wish granted.

I was, in my own eyes, a veritable James Bond — only younger, darker, and possibly better paid.

it is not always possible to restore one's boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of us is now outside, and something of the outside is now within us.

You are who you pretend to be.

Even I don't wake up looking like Cindy Crawford. —Cindy Crawford

People who're nuts never doubt their own sanity. (The Killer's Cousin)

The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

She may resent Playboy because she resents feeling ugly in sex--or, if beautiful, her body defined and diminished by pornography. It inhibits in her something she needs to live, and gives her the ultimate anaphrodisiac: the self-critical sexual gaze. Alice Walker's essay Coming Apart investigates the damage done: Comparing herself to her lover's pornography, her heroine foolishly decides that she is not beautiful.

In a survey of 494 middle-class schoolgirls in San Francisco, more than half described themselves as overweight, while only 15 percent were so by medical standards. Thirtyone percent of nine-year-olds thought they were too fat, and 81 percent of the ten-year-olds were dieters.

What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys [...]

In studies of body self-perception, women regularly overestimate their body size; in a study of economic self-perception, they regularly underestimate their business expenses. The point is that the two misperceptions are causally related. By valuing women's skills at artificially low levels and tying their physical value into the workplace, the market protects its pool of cheap female labor.

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Books are boring.' 'Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you

You'll become who you believe you are.

She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.

me parece que este es un Morris Finestein de primera.

Like most ministers, Peter was not the best judge of his own sermons. Almost invariably when he thought he had written one of his best, the rest of us did not rate it so highly. And, when on Saturday night he was bemoaning a terrible sermon, he could be pretty sure his congregation would think it terrific. How other people rated his sermons was a constant source of astonishment to him. That's what keeps me humble, he often said.