Quotes About Validation

It only serves to show what sort of person a man must be who can't even get testimonials. No, no; if a man brings references, it proves nothing; but if he can't, it proves a great deal.

In high school I was the dog, always, and I never have felt comfortable or right in my body, and part of my whole exhibitionist thing has probably been a way of testing to see whether or not I really was this repulsive creature that I felt like for so long.

You have to trust yourself, not research. Not testing. Testing helps, but you have to trust your own taste. If your taste says something isn't any good, don't let research rationalize that out of its own truth.

The fact that we don't keep repeating tests in the same arena is not because the probability of the hypothesis showing its falsity in other arenas goes up after it has passed tests in one arena.

Brains, like hearts, go where they are appreciated.

Recognition is powerful, as long as it's authentic and specific. Whatever their level on the inverted pyramid, employees wants to feel needed and valued.

Indeed, being relevant is not the problem. However, the obsessive, all-consuming desire to want to be accepted by the world because you are relevant is! The minute this becomes our modus operandi, we compromise ourselves right out of our purpose, which is to be salt and light in a darkened world.

Mean To His Horses seeks the approval of others, and not finding it, heaps it upon himself.

To people who were not seen or were misunderstood as children, the experience of being seen as a person can be very moving, tantamount to a spiritual experience.

We wouldn't spend so much time worrying about what other people think of us if we realized how seldom they do.

By adolescence, if not earlier, people are getting feedback about their market value, feedback that shapes their self-esteem and thus affects how high they aim their sights.

De mí se dirá posiblemente que soy un escritor cómico, a lo sumo. Y será cierto. No me interesa demasiado la definición que se haga de mí. No aspiro al Nobel de Literatura. Yo me doy por muy bien pagado cuando alguien se me acerca y me dice: me cagué de risa con tu libro.

Too many folk, women and men, love the person they wish to be, as if by loving that person, or being loved by that person, they could attain the importance they long for.

Oh, and you accuse me of flattery! Here I waddle about like a fat old duck and you try to tell me I'm lovely.

Damn it, a man has to see himself reflected somewhere to be sure he is real

What sort of person would cling to the hope that someone else would return to give meaning to her life? What sort of quivering parasite needed someone else to validate her existence?

They need other people to make them think they're alive. They only feel like they're important if someone else tells them they are.

The man who must brag for himself knows that no one else will

Am I pretty? I must be, I thought, for all girls in love are pretty.

How many of us allow others to define us and thus we become what they want us to be, not what we should be or could be?

The more you must assert your own reality to people, the crazier you seem.

What did the kids call it these days? Sweaty tryhard? When you bent over backward to get someone to like you?

This is how we define ourselves now, our worth determined by how many people like, follow, engage.

Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste . . . years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just . . . take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that, and walk away. But that's hard.