Quotes About Self-doubt

Everything's such an effort, even caring a little. Even being such a gigantic fuck-up wears me out.

I've read a lot of first-rate writing, and I have some critical sense; so I know where I stand. I'll never be first rate. I'll improve with practice, I trust, but I haven't got what it takes to reach the top.

Not feeling "good enough" interferes with the decision-making process. How can you make a good decision when you're not sure about yourself?

2. We must also stop scaring ourselves. Many of us terrorize ourselves with frightful thoughts and make situations worse than they are.

We have ideas about ourselves that we use as limitations or resistance to changing. We are: Too old. Too young. Too fat. Too thin. Too short. Too tall. Too lazy. Too strong. Too weak. Too dumb. Too smart. Too poor. Too worthless. Too frivolous. Too serious. Too stuck. Maybe it's just all too much.

FINE stood for Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Egotistical.

FINE? Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic and Egotistical?

Fucked-up. Insecure. Neurotic. Egotistical.

She never had to save herself. She never knew she could.

Don't believe everything you think. Chief Inspector Gamache wrote that on the board for the incoming cadets at the start of every year at the Sûreté academy, and it stayed there all year. At first the students in the class he taught laughed. It sounded clever but silly. Little by little most got it. And those who didn't did not progress further. That phrase was as powerful as any weapon they'd be handed.

And the enemy you'll be fighting is yourself.

I've never been ready to do a single thing I've ever done in my life. I haven't been prepared enough, haven't studied enough, haven't known enough. You can never be ready. There's just so much to know.

I used to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they were staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn't tell. I mean, I was just me. Then one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did. That was the day I started to believe they might be right.

When you get down to it, though, explaining what you believe isn't all that easy. If you say that you believe something to be true, you might mean one of two things—that you're still weighing the alternatives, or that you accept it as a fact. I don't logically see how one single word can have contradictory definitions, but emotionally, I completely understand. Because there are times I think what I am doing is right, and there are other times I second-guess myself every step of the way.

If you ask me who Ruth Jefferson was a month ago, I would have said she's a good nurse, and she's a good mother. But now I have people telling me I wasn't a good nurse. And if I can't put a casserole on the table and cloth on your back, then I have to second guess myself as a mother too. If you don't let me do this, if you don't let me take care of you, then I don't know who i'm suppose to be anymore.

It makes me wonder how I'd be treated if I were like everyone else. Maybe I'm a pretty rotten person, not that anyone would ever have the guts to tell me this to my face. Maybe everyone thinks I'm rude or ugly or stupid but they have to be nice because it could be the circumstances of my life that make me that way.

And he says, "I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with me. And I think I realized that I'm average, that there's nothing remarkable about me. And I wanted to know if this is something other people think about.

I was a shy kid and I was afraid what I said sounded stupid, so I hardly ever said anything. I was the third wheel. Fifth wheel? I was the fucking wheel you didn't really need, but I still hung around. I thought maybe my silence would one day impress somebody. As of yet, it hadn't done much for me.

The world's first task, as I knew well, a task it never relaxed from, was to undo me. I was even afraid of the sky.

Shame is the affect which is the source of many complex and disturbing inner states: depression, alienation, self doubt, isolating loneliness, paranoid and schizoid phenomena, compulsive disorders, splitting of the self, perfectionism, a deep sense of inferiority, inadequacy or failure, the so-called borderline conditions and disorders of narcissism.

Perfectionists can rarely affirm themselves; therefore, it's very difficult for them to affirm others.

But perhaps the biggest interruption coming from your inside is caused by your worrying about making a mistake.

He had never been a man who attracted women, and he exaggerated their coldness towards him. Indeed in regard to the love of women he had a physical humility that was almost a mania. One of the strongest holds that Mary had over him was the simple fact that she, a sweet-looking, intellectual girl, could be in love with him at all! Secretly John regarded himself as the most unlovable human creature then living in Glastonbury.

It's hard growing up in a world where you never feel like you're good enough.