Quotes About Self-defeating

People believe that separation opens their eyes to their self-defeating behaviors and gives them an opportunity to resolve those problems with a new partner. But unless they under- stand the unconscious desires that motivated their dysfunctional behavior in the first relationship and learn how to satisfy those desires with the new partner, the second relationship is destined to run aground on the same submerged rocks.

All forms of self-defeating behavior are unseen and unconscious, which is why their existence is denied.

Most "superheroes" are nothing of the sort. They're weird, neurotic creatures who do big things DESPITE lots of self-defeating habits and self-talk.

we learn the emotional habits that can undermine our best intentions, as well as what we can do to subdue our more destructive or self-defeating emotional impulses. Most important, the neurological data suggest a window of opportunity for shaping our children's emotional habits.

We are all to some extent the products of an exploitive society, and it would be foolish and self-defeating to pretend that we do not bear its stamp.

Quentin's conversations with his parents were so circular and self-defeating, they sounded like experimental theater.

There is nothing worth having that can be obtained by nuclear war - nothing material or ideological - no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.

It's a bad strategy to have an identity-based strategy on the left. De-emphasizing identity all-around would help our politics because we would have to pay more attention to the issues. We may have to pay more attention to class if we didn't have these self-defeating identity agendas.

Excuses are contagious, self-defeating bad habits. Where

But it appears to me that for our patient truth is what he can persuade others to believe: yet at the same time he is a man of some parts, and I suspect that were you to attack him through his reason, were you to persuade him to abandon this self-defeating practice, with its anxiety, its probability of detection, and to seek only a more legitimate approval, then we should have no need for belladonna or any other anhidrotic.

My son . . . guilt, in proper measure, can be a useful emotion. However, when indulged to excess it becomes self-defeating, and even worse, tedious.

Legislation that would withhold funding for the United Nations is fundamentally flawed in concept and practice, sets us back, is self-defeating, and doesn't work.

taking pride in such ignorance is self-defeating.

This taught me not only that it's difficult to predict markets, but also that small investors tend to be pessimistic and optimistic at precisely the wrong times, so it's self-defeating to try to invest in good markets and get out of bad ones.

I'm persnickety, I confessed. Not, incidentally, to the point of being snarly. But still. Delightful and persnickety are not a common blend. Do you want to know why I never married? The question wasn't at the top of my list, I admitted. The old woman made me meet her eye. Listen to me; I never married because I was easily bored. It's an awful, self-defeating trait to have. It is much better to be too easily interested.

I never married because I was too easily bored. It's an awful, self-defeating trait to have. It's much better to be too easily interested.

to bar communication between intellectuals, who are always our best hope of peace, is particularly self-defeating and inane. It declares, inter alia, that we have a) made up our minds about what we think, b) closed our minds to what others think, and c) chosen to go on hearing nothing with which we happen to disagree.

Hank's self-defeating conduct stemmed in part from his perception that he was being marketed as a commodity.

Insistence on conformity—cultural, religious, or otherwise—was self-defeating, causing strife and undermining trade and business.

Listen to me: I never married because I was too easily bored. It's an awful, self-defeating trait to have. It's much better to be too easily interested.

I never married because I was too easily boref. It's an awful, self-defeating trait to have. It's much better to be too easily interested.

Listen to me: I never married because I was too easily bored. It's an awful, self-defeating trait to have. It's much better to be too easily interested.

Striving for excellence is a positive quality. Striving for perfection is self-defeating.

The more anxious and alone or inadequate and incompetent they feel, the more tenaciously they hold to whatever thoughts, attitudes and behaviors bring relief. If they do not develop more effective coping mechanisms, the ones that bring relief solidify into self-defeating behaviors.