Quotes About Self-doubt

All of us wrestle with the angels of our inabilities all the time. We live in fear that our incapacities will be exposed. We posture and evaluate and assess and criticize mercilessly.

I have a tough time judging myself.

I'm just used to leaving and being like, "I feel like I wasted their time and I definitely wasted my own time." I often leave auditions thinking that that person is now permanently mad at me.

Every time I perform in front of people, no matter how well it goes, the next day, I feel humiliated.

You feel the shame, humiliation, and anger at being just another victim of prejudice, and at the same time, there's the nagging worry that maybe... you're just no good.

Self-doubt does more to sabotage individual potential than all external limitations put together.

So it was just a case of getting a bunch of songs that I had been writing for years but hadn't recorded together, and the result was My Own Best Enemy.

When one does not believe oneself in any way good, there is very little for which to live - and one feels unworthy of even what little there is.

There must be something terribly wrong with her, Camille thought, that she could neither feel nor attract love. Was it possible that her quest for perfection had somehow deadened an essential part of herself?

She was, for several unpleasant moments, the isolated, lonely, insecure person she had been just three years earlier, a social blunderer, a locker-room towel for the maladjusted, unable to sell an article or figure out what to wear. Pull yourself together, she thought; it wasn't so bad.

The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness.

When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?

My total friendlessness, my horror of pushing, and inability to put myself forward unless led, cherished and supported – all this has sunk me in a state of loneliness no other human being, ever before, I believe endured – except Robinson Crusoe . .

I shrink into myself in despair at my nothingness.

Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?

once you start doubting yourself it's over

Did he know that she was so dissatisfied with herself that she was always pretending to be different? Probably he did, and despised her for it. More than anyone she knew, Joe Willard was always, fearlessly, himself.

And when she went that far in her thoughts it sounded absurd. Was she the same Emily Webster who had been so humble and adoring with Don? Could it be she seriously thought it possible that anyone so desirable as Jed Wakeman could be in love with her? The truth was that she did.

So much of anxiety was anxiety about having anxiety.

she felt secure only in her terrible sense of insecurity.

I don't think I really like myself. And I blame the Old Man for this.

Once I got to college and became friends with fellow students and professors who were openly gay, though, I realized the overt discrimination and hate they were subject to, as well as the loneliness and self-doubt that the dominant culture imposed on them. I felt ashamed of my past behavior—and learned to do better.

Looking back, I realize I was doing what most of us tend to do when we're uncertain or floundering: We reach for what feels familiar, what we think we're good at.

Sometimes writing is pure hell. I'll write something and look at it in a few hours and say, This is crap. What will I do with my life? I'll never write again. It's a bipolar business, and you bounce back. You become gripped with some new insight that shows the way.