Quotes About Self-perception

Draco's not really a bully. He's not exactly the biggest, strongest guy in the world. He's more a rich, snobby person. He thinks of himself as really cool.

Maybe Larry was wrong about the word friend, maybe he'd been shoved away from everybody for so long all he was was a sponge for the wrongs other people did. Maybe, after all this time, he'd started to believe their version of him.

Guilt is also a way for us to express to others that we are a person of good conscience. 'I feel really guilty about getting drunk last night,' we say, when in actual fact we feel no guilt whatsoever or, at least, we could choose to feel no guilt. When people say to me, 'I drank too much last night,' I always reply, 'I drank exactly the right amount.

Eva Wilt got to her feet and stood with the rain running down her face and as she stood there the illusions that had sustained her through the week disappeared. She saw herself as a fat, silly woman who had left her husband in pursuit of a glamour that was false and shoddy and founded on brittle talk and money.

I tell you I'm tired of hearing it. There ain't nothing that happens to a person that ain't that person. The world out there only does what you tell it to do. The world is happening to you the way it is happening because you're telling yourself the story that way. If you want to change the world so damn bad, Ida, then where you got to start is how it is you're looking at it.

We all have wanted, at one time or another, to appear as an idealized self. "I'm actually a quite different person," as the playwright Ödön von Horváth wrote, "I just never get around to being him.

Our confidence has been so shaken by this cult of expertise and performance that when we don't perceive ourselves to be experts at something, we're almost expected to outsource the task who someone who does.

The average person believes that they are better than the average person.

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

Listen—when you're on the toilet, from the point of view of the toilet, you are not an icon taking a crap. You are a bottom taking a crap. If you can get that, you're going to be okay.

I am alone all day, I read a little but it gives me a headache. I draw and I paint, as much as I can, so much so that my hand gets tired and when it begins to get dark I wait to see if Jeanne d'Armagnac [one of the cousins] will come and sit by my bed. She comes sometimes and tries to distract me and play with me, and I listen to her speak without daring to look at her, she is so tall and so beautiful! And I am neither tall nor beautiful.

It's funny about me,' Sophia said. 'I always feel like such a nice girl whenever there's a storm.' "'You do?' Grandmother said. 'Well, maybe ...' Nice, she thought. No. I'm certainly not nice. The best you could say of me is that I'm interested. [pp. 150-151]

And then, more softly, but chiming from somewhere inside both of them: I wonder what she thinks of me.

Ye that are slaves of the self and toil in its service from morn until night, ye that live in constant fear of birth, old age, sickness, and death, receive the good tidings that your cruel master exists not. Self is an error, an illusion, a dream. Open your eyes and awaken. See things as they are and ye will be comforted. He who is awake will no longer be afraid of nightmares. He who has recognized the nature of the rope that seemed to be a serpent will cease to tremble.

Some say that the self endures after death, some say it perishes. Both are wrong and their error is most grievous.

We wouldn't worry nearly as much about what others thought of us if we recognize how seldom they do.

You are what you believe yourself to be

Beauty is present in all creation, but the danger lies in the fact that we allow ourselves to be influenced by what people think. We deny our own beauty because others can't or won't recognize it. We try to imitate what we see around us. We try to be what other people think of as 'pretty' & little by little, our soul fades. We forget the world is what we imagine it to be. We stop being the sun and become, instead, the pool of water reflecting it.

It's like the Léon Damas story about the black man on the bus who felt bad because the only other black man on the same bus was ugly and sweaty and dirty and ill-kempt. It is hard to express it. So sad.

IT WAS HER FORTIETH birthday. Madame Wu sat before the tilted mirror of her toilet case and looked at her own calm face. In her mind she was comparing it with the face she had seen in this same mirror when she was sixteen.

In her mind she was comparing it with the face she had seen in this same mirror when she was sixteen.

The root of these fundamentalist tendencies, these dogmatic tendencies, is a fixed identity—a fixed view we have of ourselves as good or bad, worthy or unworthy, this or that. With a fixed identity, we have to busy ourselves with trying to rearrange reality, because reality doesn't always conform to our view.

About myself - no. I'm unimportant, an observer, a wandering animal.

The way I look is part of it. It sounds affected but I do see myself as a piece of living art.