Quotes about self-esteem (123 quotes, page 2)

“An efficient woman secretary is the perfect assistant. Her role is not confined to taking dictation and "tapping out" letters; she must also file letters and replies, memorize addresses, and turn herself into a walking index. She must possess all the virtues of a departmental head, as well as those of a woman. Being a woman, she has intuition; she can keep intact the self-esteem of her superiors, and she spreads and agreeable atmosphere about the office. At the same time she must not make her femininity obvious, for if one of her superiors should become too conscious of it, the work would suffer. A difficult balance, but one that can be maintained.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Suffering , Time , Perfection

“Socialism is, among other things, the political habitat of low self-esteem, incompetence, self-loathing, and a willingness to steal – or have stolen for you — what you are unable or unwilling to work for. Socialism is a philosophy fit only for slugs, leaches, and mosquitoes.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Alice Shrugged," http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/?p=51 18 December 2008.

“When, for whatever reason, self-esteem is unattainable, the autonomous individual becomes a highly explosive entity. He turns away from an unpromising self and plunges into the pursuit of pride — the explosive substitute for self-esteem. All social disturbances and upheavals have their roots in crises of individual self-esteem, and the great endeavor in which the masses most readily unite is basically a search for pride.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 29
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)
Context: A fateful process is set in motion when the individual is released "to the freedom of his own impotence" and left to justify his existence by his own efforts. The autonomous individual, striving to realize himself and prove his worth, has created all that is great in literature, art, music, science and technology. The autonomous individual, also, when he can neither realize himself nor justify his existence by his own efforts, is a breeding call of frustration, and the seed of the convulsions which shake our world to its foundations.
The individual on his own is stable only so long as he is possessed of self-esteem. The maintenance of self-esteem is a continuous task which taxes all of the individual's powers and inner resources. We have to prove our worth and justify our existence anew each day. When, for whatever reason, self-esteem is unattainable, the autonomous individual becomes a highly explosive entity. He turns away from an unpromising self and plunges into the pursuit of pride — the explosive substitute for self-esteem. All social disturbances and upheavals have their roots in crises of individual self-esteem, and the great endeavor in which the masses most readily unite is basically a search for pride.

Search

“As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)
Context: As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery. No Lincolnian emancipation proclamation or Johnsonian civil rights bill can totally bring this kind of freedom. The negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation. And, with a spirit straining toward true self-esteem, the Negro must boldly throw off the manacles of self-abegnation and say to himself and to the world, "I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man with dignity and honor. I have a rich and noble history, however painful and exploited that history has been. Yes, I was a slave through my foreparents, and now I’m not ashamed of that. I'm ashamed of the people who were so sinful to make me a slave." Yes, yes, we must stand up and say, "I'm black, but I'm black and beautiful." This, this self-affirmation is the black man's need, made compelling by the white man's crimes against him.

Sense , Freedom , Night

“Dear Gillian,

You are completely and utterly self obsessed. If you spent a quarter of your time thinking about others instead of how much you hate your thighs, your level of contentment and self worth would expand exponentially. One thing I learned way too late in the game for my own good was that you can effectively increase your self esteem by doing estimable things.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

Therefore I have signed you up to build homes for the homeless during your entire summer vacation. Your Christmas will be spent serving food at a battered women’s shelter and Easter is designated to reading stories to children in the pediatric cancer ward. Four months out of 16years dedicated to human beings other than yourself, you have gotten off easy. Oh and honey expand your horizons; your world is a bigger oyster than your low self-esteem wants you to believe. Love yourself; think of others and be grateful. I love you, I believe in you, and I look forward to respecting you.

Me. You. Us

P.S. Follow your dreams, not your boyfriends.
Anderson's letter to her teenage self — from Dear Me: More Letters To My Sixteen-Year-Old Self http://www.dearme.org/excerpt/GA/?iframe=true&width=750&height=100%/, edited by Joseph Galliano. (June 19, 2011)
2010s

Hate , Way , Game , Thinking

“I wonder how many of the people who profess to believe in the leveling ideas of collectivism and egalitarianism really just believe that they themselves are good for nothing. I mean, how many leftists are animated by a quite reasonable self-loathing? In their hearts they know that they are not going to become scholars or inventors or industrialists or even ordinary good kind people. So they need a way to achieve that smugness for which the left is so justifiably famous. They need a way to achieve self-esteem without merit. Well, there is politics. In an egalitarian world everything will be controlled by politics, and politics requires no merit.”

P. J. O'Rourke (1947) American journalist

A Message to Redistributionists (1997)

People , World , Way , Idea

“While we are in recovery we need to be able to strike a balance between not allowing our ego to do all the talking and not letting our low self-esteem to only present what is wrong with us.”

Noah Levine (1971) American Buddhist teacher

Refuge Recovery (2014)

Self-confidence

“Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world. Human conflicts are life and death struggles—my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your immortality project. The root of humanly caused evil is not man’s animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

Foreword
The Denial of Death (1973)

Selfishness , God , Nature , Animals

“This blaming Westerners naturally extends into the field of scholarship. Thus, the evil of Indians aping Westerners is blamed on Westerners, including Orientalists, in that they are said to have deduced many Indian achievements from foreign sources and thus hurt Indian self-esteem. E. g., even now the Dutch Orientalist Johannes Bronkhorst derives Buddhist Abhidharma and debating techniques from Greek philosophy, just as many before him allotted a pivotal role to the Greeks in developing the best of Hindu civilization, including the Buddha statue and the culture of Mandirs (temples) and Murtis (idols). David Pingree and Kim Plofker derive much of Indian astronomy from Mesopotamia. They are probably wrong, but I would plead for their apoliticism and innocence.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2010s, The argumentative Hindu (2012)

Self-confidence , Hurt , Evil , Nature

“In the strident world of seventeenth-century philosophy, the mind-body problem was not a word puzzle that could be safely relegated to undergraduate classes. For men such as Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz, solving the mind-body problem was vital to preserving the theological and political order inherited from the Middle Ages and, more generally, to protecting human self-esteem in the face of an increasingly truculent universe. For Spinoza, it was a means of destroying that same order and discovering a new foundation for human worth.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Matthew Stewart, in his book The Courtier and the Heretic (2006)
S - Z

Universe , Problem , Self-confidence , Age

“Behind all the Great-Society-style housing/anti-poverty/education programs lurked all the old stereotypes: blacks as animalistic, criminal, sexual, violent, and above all, as time went on, as pathological. The white power structures are always diagnosing the dysfunctions and prescribing a cure for the black family: high-rise housing projects, compulsory education and standardized testing, wars on poverty or drugs, self-esteem seminars. A good portion of the African-American population was simply institutionalized or interned, in public housing complexes, in urban schools, and in one of the biggest prison systems the world has ever known. It all amounts to a sprawling race gulag in which people are both dependent and hedged about with restrictions.”

Crispin Sartwell (1958) American philosopher

White Liberals: We’re Not Racist (August 29, 2016)

School , Family , Time , Housing

“Man's need of self-esteem entails the need for a sense of control over reality – but no control is possible in a universe which, by one's own concession, contains the supernatural, the miraculous and the causeless, a universe in which one is at the mercy of ghosts and demons, in which one must deal, not with the unknown, but with the unknowable; no control is possible if man proposes, but a ghost disposes; no control is possible if the universe is a haunted house.”

Nathaniel Branden (1930–2014) Canadian–American psychotherapist and writer

As reprinted in Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (1964; 2014 ebook), ISBN 978-1-101-13722-2, p. 44 https://books.google.com/books?id=d1GqjIhRejMC&pg=PT44.
"Mental Health versus Mysticism and Self-Sacrifice" (1963)

Housing , Universe , Self-confidence , Reality

“To give up before we even start, using low self-esteem or lack of qualifications as an excuse, is, frankly, gutless. As human beings we are all born with not only the wherewithal to be creative, but also the need.”

Will Gompertz (1965) British journalist

Think Like an Artist (2015)

Self-confidence

“The demon of avarice, it seems to me, is extraordinarily complex and is baffling in his deceits. Often, when frustrated by the strictness of our renunciation, he immediately pretends to be a steward and a lover of the poor; he urges us to prepare a welcome for strangers who have not yet arrived or to send provisions for absent brethren. He makes us mentally visit prisons in the city and ransom those on sale as slaves. He suggests that we should attach ourselves to wealthy women, and advises us to be obsequious to others who have a full purse. And so, after deceiving the soul, little by little he engulfs it in avaricious thoughts and then hands it over to the demon of self-esteem.”

Evagrius Ponticus (345–399) Christian monk

On Discrimination, vol. 1, p. 51
The Philokalia

Soul , Self-confidence , Lovers , Making love

“In the whole range of evil thoughts, none is richer in resources than self-esteem.”

Evagrius Ponticus (345–399) Christian monk

On Discrimination, vol. 1, p. 46
The Philokalia

Self-confidence , Evil

“Many will know for the first time that they count, that they matter in the scheme of things. An unfamiliar sense of self-esteem will replace their present hopelessness; drugs of all kinds will cease their hold on men. Quietly, men’s tears will flow in humble gratitude and longing for the good.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Awakening of Humanity (2008)

Time , Gratitude , Self-confidence , Sense

“I never really liked too much attention, which can be good and bad, if someone gives me a compliment it just goes in one ear and out the other, and if someone says something really horrible it’s the same. I just learned not to value my self-esteem and who I am as a person on the popularity of a film or how famous I am at the time. I guess I had the perspective of how it can be there one time and not another. And life is the most exciting part, really living, you know?”

Liv Tyler (1977) American actress, producer and former model

Liv Tyler On Her Iconic Career, Living Through Fame And The Importance Of Female Friendship http://www.oystermag.com/2018/11/liv-tyler-on-her-iconic-career-living-through-fame-and-the-importance-of-female-friendship-for-oyster-115/ (November 28, 2018)

Time , Personality , Bad luck , Learning

“…We carry ourselves different — maybe we tell our jokes in a different way or a different style — and we were beating ourselves up in allowing that patriarchal energy to affect our self-esteem. And then I was like, "Yeah, I'm good at this job."”

Phoebe Robinson (1984) American comedian

On how female comedians might initially doubt themselves in “Phoebe Robinson: There's No Excuse For The Lack Of Diversity In Comedy” https://www.npr.org/2018/10/15/657459180/comic-phoebe-robinson-theres-no-excuse-for-hollywoods-lack-of-diversity in NPR (2018 Oct 15)

Way , Self-confidence