Quotes About Self-doubt

People who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you're just quietly going about a life of your own choosing. They will make you doubt yourself, which, depending on cases, can be a severe distraction and a waste of time. This is a thing I wish I had understood much earlier than I did.

If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.

Les hommes s'efforcent de croire en Dieu parce qu'ils n'ont pas confiance en eux-mêmes. Et l'histoire nous démontre qu'ils n'ont pas tort car jusqu'à présent nous n'avons pas été bien fiables.

What do you want me to say, sir? That I'm the vegetable that I refused to become, that I'm so disappointed in myself that I can no longee look at myself in the mirror? That I hate myself?

But she wasn't really listening, because underneath it all ran the fear that it had nothing to do with good fortune, that he had earned this, and she resented him because she could have done it, too, if she'd applied herself properly, become a lawyer, moved to Canada, run a business, and what she saw when she looked at Richard was not his success but her own failure.

He suddenly began to look wretched, much as I had seen him look as a schoolboy: lonely: awkward: unpopular: odd; no longer the self-confident businessman into which he had grown. His face now brought back the days when one used to watch him plodding off through the drizzle to undertake the long, solitary runs across the dismal fields beyond the sewage farms: runs which were to train him for teams in which he was never included.

The only reason we don't have what we want in life is the reasons we create why we can't have them.

That is to say, we think you cannot do so. People can do so many things that they don't think they can do; and can't do so many things that they think that they can do!

I daresay I am an idiot," said Miss Macnulty, resuming her novel.

Criticism is something you can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

I trust that I am not more dense than my neighbours, but I was always oppressed with a sense of my own stupidity in my dealings with Sherlock Holmes.

I feel stupid when people say 'You? You are so brave,' because I don't feel brave, I don't even know what brave is.

I have been found wanting, Natalie thought; I have made myself unnacceptable and am not worthy.

Let him be wise, or let me be blind; don't let me, she hoped concretely, don't let me know too surely what he thinks of me.

I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside. "No," she said aloud, and the one word echoed.

losing her temper, which she did rarely because she was so afraid of being ineffectual

don't let me, she hoped concretely, don't let me know too surely what he thinks of me.

to send me away." Why me, she wondered, why me? Am I the public conscience? Expected always to say in cold words what the rest of them are too arrogant to recognize? Am I supposed to be the weakest

Whenever he saw his books in a store, he felt like he'd gotten away with something, said John Updike. Who also expressed the opinion that a nice person wouldn't become a writer. The problem of self-doubt. The problem of shame. The problem of self-loathing. You once put it like this: When I get so fed up with something I'm writing that I decide to quit, and then, later, I find myself irresistibly drawn back to it, I always think: Like a dog to its vomit.

How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?

She could not escape asking (in the exact words and mental intonations which a thousand million women, dairy wenches and mischief-making queens, had used before her, and which a million million women will know hereafter), Was it all a horrible mistake, my marrying him? She quieted the doubt--without answering it.

Suddenly I've had enough of all this. I've had enough of being made to feel insecure and paranoid and wondering what's going on

You keep saying 'I'm fine' to people when you're not fine. You think you should be fine. You keep saying to yourself: 'Why aren't I fine?

Are you so scared people will hate you?" "What?" I stare at him, not knowing how to react. "What are you talking about?" He gestures at the phone. "Your emails are like one big cry. Kiss, kiss, hug, hug, please like me, please like me!