Quotes About Self-doubt

How am I doing so far? she asked, forcing a cheerful lightness into her voice. You're doing very well, Nick's lazy voice mocked. I'm half convinced that I'm invisible.

How am I doing so far? she asked, forc­ing a cheer­ful light­ness into her voice. You're doing very well, Nick's lazy voice mocked. I'm half con­vinced that I'm in­vis­i­ble.

How can I stop worrying when I don't know if I'm going to turn out normal?" "I promise, you'll turn out normal." Are

The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing.

he was trying to convince himself that he wasn't guilty.

He is suffering from delusions of adequacy.

Entonces, uno de los principales enemigos para crear un buen autoconcepto es la falta de confianza en sí mismo, la manía de crear expectativas de fracaso o pensar que no es capaz. Si desconfías de ti, no podrás amarte.

Abashed, should assumed its place in the list of what could be accomplished, what couldn't.

I always felt like whatever I achieved - grades, salaries, promotions, even my wife and children - was a mistake. Like I had somehow fooled everyone into thinking I was worthy of what they'd given me.

The slug will always tell the caterpillar that it can't fly.

Anxiety is fear of one's self.

The problem with being British... I don't know if it's me being British or being raised a strict Catholic, but you never really enjoy success.

These voices — the inner critic, the inner nag, the inner pest, the inner jerk and all the other monsters who try to talk you out of moving forward— are the part of you that is threatened by change and progress. We all have them. They are trying to protect you from new and scary things, but they are out of sync with you right now and not helpful. They hate what you are doing, but that doesn't make them right

Van Gogh summarized this entire book in a single sentence: "If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

I didn't know how to feel. I'd been rebuffed. I hadn't even been trying to buff.

I became my own worst enemy, conflicted about my right to ask, self-conscious about my rising anger, and too often stuck with the choice between fighting or just taking care of it, whatever it was, on my own.

Every single time a self-doubting or fearful thought enters your mind, realize it, reject it, and replace it with faith.

We're afraid others will see our flaws, weaknesses and insecurities. We're afraid if others really knew us, they would reject us. We feel like fakes and frauds in a world that seems to have it all together.

fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your own work.

To require perfection is to invite paralysis.

But curiously, while artists always have a myriad of reasons to quit, they consistently wait for a handful of specific moments to quit. Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail. And artists quit when they lose the destination for their work — for the place their work belongs.

Making art is difficult. We leave drawings unfinished and stories unwritten. We do work that does not feel like our own. We repeat ourselves. We stop before we have mastered our materials, or continue on long after their potential is exhausted. Often the work we have not done seems more real in our minds than the pieces we have completed. And so questions arise: How does art get done? Why, often, does it not get done? And what is the nature of the difficulties that stop so many who start?

Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be.