Quotes About Self-perception

Illusion I will be, for I've never been a sinner.

As art reveals the artist more than the world, so you see yourself and what you are not in the mirror of another culture.

What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.

What you believe to be the truth directly determines your attitude towards yourself and the world, the words you say and the actions you take.

Someone has said that after age forty, each of us pretty much deserves the face he is wearing. He designed it form the inside.

She looked long and lean and beautiful, and she was totally unaware of her looks as she called him. She had lived in a world of extraordinary-looking people for so long, and hers was a life of the mind rather than the beauty of face and body. She never thought about it, which somehow made her even more attractive.

There's nothing like feeling like sh_t to kill your libido.

I realize that I'm far less familiar with my own privates than with Guy's, and I've seen his only twice! I guess that's to be expected, since girls can't really look at ourselves without a reflection, whereas nothing's hidden with boys. It seems unfair, but there's also something neat about it being shrouded in secrecy.

But knowing me the way I do (now that sounds weird!)

If Peter was nine, and a new boy came to St. Norbert's Home for Wayward Boys who said he was ten, why, then, Peter would declare himself eleven. Also, he could spit the farthest. That made him the undisputed leader.

Sometimes I don't feel as if I'm a person at all. I'm just a collection of other people's ideas.

Your feelings do not determine your worth, simply your relative state of comfort or discomfort.

Overgeneralization. You generalize from some specific flaw, failure, or mistake to your entire self. Or you may generalize the way you feel right now, or some negative experience you've just had, to the future.

Discounting the Positive. This is an even more spectacular mental error. You tell yourself that your positive qualities or successes don't count. You convince yourself that you're completely bad, inferior, or worthless.

Emotional Reasoning. This involves reasoning from the way you feel, such as: "I feel like an idiot, so I must be one" or "I feel hopeless, so things are never going to get better." Or in the case of panic attacks, "I feel like I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown, so I must be in a lot of danger.

That is what cognitive distortions are: a highly misleading way of thinking about yourself and the world.

You'll stop worrying what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do.

You'll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.

That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

Now a second-order vain person is a vain person who's also vain about appearing to have an utter lack of vanity. Who's enormously afraid that other people will perceive him as vain. A second-order vain person will sit up late learning jokes in order to appear funny and charming, but will deny that he sits up late learning jokes. Or he'll perhaps even try to give the impression that he doesn't regard himself as funny at all.

The fraud part of me was always there, just as a puzzle piece, objectively speaking, is a true piece of the puzzle even before you see how it fits.

a quick intelligence he squanders on an insatiable need to advance some impression of himself—that

As most adults know, the distinctions between one's essential character and value and people's perceptions of that character/value are fuzzy and hard to delineate, especially in adolescence.

wondered why the presence of Americans could always make him feel vaguely ashamed after saying things he believed.