Quotes About Self-perception

The girl reflected back from the window in front of me has poinsettias growing out of her belly and head. She's the shape of a breakfast-link sausage standing on broomstick legs, her arms made from twigs, her face blurred with an eraser. I know that this is me, but it's not me, not really. I don't know what I look like. I can't remember how to look.

I lean into the mirror. Eyes after eyes after eyes stare back at me. Am I in there somewhere? A thousand eyes blink.

I'm sure I was a huge disappointment. I'm not pretty or smart or athletic. I'm just like them—an ordinary drone dressed in secrets and lies.

Expert Tip: "The day will come when you fervently wish that you are only as fat as you were the FIRST time you thought you were fat."—Michelle Loyet, MAW, whom I've been on vacation with numerous times

In every walk of life, you do have the freedom to choose, but that freedom is based on the perception of the world and yourself which you have gained until that moment of life.

I am a boring looking guy with a common face, ugly scars and a toothy smile.

The mirror can lie. Doesn't show you what's inside. And it, it can tell you you're full of life. It's amazing what you can hide just by putting on a smile.

I don't see my skin aging. I see my skin looking as good, or better, than it did ten years ago...and that makes me smile.

It's hard to sit on the floor and change your socks without looking as though you're sitting on the floor changing your socks

Not all creatures can become as great as they think.

Though from a position of unrequited love they long to see their love returned, Marxists unconsciously prefer that their dreams remain in the realm of fantasy. Why should others think any better of them than they of themselves? Only so long as the loved one believes the Marxist to be more or less nothing, can the Marxist continue to believe the loved one to be more or less everything.

What matters is not what we seem to a random group, but what we know we are. In Schopenhauer's words: 'Every reproach can hurt only to the extent that it hits the mark. Whoever actually knows that he does not deserve a reproach can and will confidently treat it with contempt.

How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young or slender. 'Thank God!' we say,' those illusions are gone.' Everything added to the self is a burden as well as a pride.

Everyone and everything that shows up in our life is a reflection of something that is happening inside of us

Please don't worry. It's a psychological complaint, common amongst ex-librarians. You see, she thinks she's a coffee table edition...

I thought as much. Miss Murray, though I am a beast, do not think that I am stupid. I know that I am hideous and hateful. I am not loved, nor ever hope to be. Nor am I fool enough to think that what I feel for you is love. But in this world, alone, I do not hate you. And alone in this world, you do not hate me.

She doesn't think she's worthy to live. But she doesn't realize, she is life.

It is hard to think about your past without tidying it up into a kind of story: one in which you are cast as the hero or victim. Invariably we ignore the regular dice-rolls of chance or random luck; successful high-flyers are typically prone to ignoring the interplay of blind fortune when they credit their career trajectories to their canny business sense or brute self-belief. We tell the story we want to tell, and we live out those stories every day.

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

We may prefer to think of ourselves as fallen angels, but in reality we are rising apes.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder are mirrors a waste of time?

You have to start by changing the story you tell yourself about getting older... The minute you say to yourself, 'Time is everything, and I'm going to make sure that time is used the way I dream it should be used,' then you've got a whole different story.

The wise men say that the remembrance of things past is all that we have for the future, and am I to blame if I've turned up this time as I shouldn't have been, when it was a high soprano I wanted, and deep corn curls to my bum, with a womb as of a fishing schooner? And what do I get but a face on me like an old child's bottom - is that happiness, do you think?

Part of my gestalt is that I still feel a little bit like a wallflower. Even in my own life. I talk about myself behind my back.