“Life for both sexes — and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement — is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle.”
Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 2, p. 35
Context: Life for both sexes — and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement — is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to one self. By feeling that one has some innate superiority — it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney — for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination — over other people.
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Virginia Woolf 382
English writer 1882–1941Related quotes
“We confide in our strength, without boasting of it; we respect that of others, without fearing it.”
Letter to William Carmichael and William Short (1793)
1790s
“I have great faith in fools — self-confidence my friends will call it.”
Marginalia http://www.easylit.com/poe/comtext/prose/margin.shtml (November 1844)
“We don’t need self-confidence we need God-confidence”
“There is a sense in which all law is nothing more nor less than a gigantic confidence trick.”
Speech to Devon Magistrates, The Times 12 April 1972.
Source: You Learn by Living (1960), p. 29–30
Context: You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." … You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
Talk titled "A World Without War" at the 2nd World Social Forum, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 31, 2002 http://www.chomsky.info/talks/200202--.htm.
Quotes 2000s, 2002
Variant: You are educated when you have the ability to hear almost anything without losing your temper, or your self-confidence.
The First Part, Chapter 6, p. 29 (See also: Rene Girard)
Leviathan (1651)