Quotes About Self-doubt

think Cool Girl could ever really like me.

No, I called myself a loser," I said, and slammed my door. "Loser.

Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately, you are always bad before you can get a little better.

Although at the time I didn't realize what was happening, I was unable to make a decision that might displease those around me. For years, whatever directive I may have issued ended with the phrase, 'If it's all right with you.' If I thought I'd done anything to make someone unhappy, I'd agonize.

The prospect that I could actually be a journalist triggered a 'Who do you think you are?' reaction in me. It was only in going to law school and being unhappy there that I realized that I really, really had to try it.

I was just unhappy - and lonely at times. There was always that other side of me nagging away, bringing me down. The anger. Even after good games, I just went home and looked at the bad points. It was just nuts.

In 2012 I hit a low in terms of confidence, enjoyment of the game, and I felt very negative and unhappy.

I can't understand it myself - how nervous I was when I took the floor for 'Strictly Come Dancing.' I walk out with 50,000 people gathered in the Millennium Stadium to fight Mikkel Kessler in the unification fight for the super middleweight division in 2007, and I feel great... and here I am, wearing tight pants and Cuban heels, and freaking out.

I feel, as a person, very uninteresting.

I think a lot of people may have a unique insight or some idea that they feel could be a great solution for a particular problem, but for some reason never have a chance to try or never have the courage or maybe the self-doubt. Really, it's best just to remain naive and continue to work on things and see if people have the same problems.

I never dreamt I could be an author when I grew up. It just didn't occur to me, because I thought you had to be a) academic, so go to university, things like that, and I didn't think I was clever, or b) dead because I just assumed all the authors in the library were dead.

When I was at University I had a sort of fear about going to the gym and that kind of blokeish environment, which was rooted in a feeling of total inadequacy, which is what fear is.

I think failing the qualifying or the 11-plus actually hurt me more than I realised. After I'd become a professor of physics at the Open University, I suddenly thought, 'This is a bit silly.' So I suddenly became much more open about it. But I think probably I was hurt by the failure and didn't want to talk about it.

I've always been the guy who doesn't necessarily get it with women. A woman would have to say, 'I like you, I want to go out with you, you can ask me.' And still I would question it. Did she mean it?

Women systematically underestimate their own abilities.

Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!

As a culture women are brought up to be fundamentally insecure.

He tells me that the best man I will ever find will be attracted to other women. I hear this as another fact I am too old not to know. More proof of how unprepared I am to love anyone.

Insecure people often falsify the past, in order to make the future pure.

And I was fairly certain that my strong-enough-for-King-Kong-but-made-for-a-woman deodorant had utterly failed. --Doom with a View

Insecurity is disconnecting from what inspires you and taking on board an external point of reference.

If you could see into a woman's heart you'd be shocked at the cracks and chasms of self-doubt, fear, and pain it holds. It's a wreck and yet it manages to love like it's never been broken.

But sometimes, when she'd be all by herself, walking home late in the evening on a crowded street she'd be afraid of her own shadow following her...

I had a crisis of confidence and ran away from being a standup for a while.