Quotes About Self-Esteem

We shall have our manhood.

— Eldridge Cleaver

The greatest possession is self-possession.

— Ethel Watts Mumford

He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.

— Susan Sontag

Of all the traps and pitfalls in life, self-disesteem is the deadliest, and hardest to overcome, for it is a pit designed and dug by our own hands, summed up in the phrase, “It’s no use—I can’t do it.”

— Maxwell Maltz

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears.  It seems to absolve us.

— Van Wyck Brooks

Many purchasers of self-help books are grappling with a creeping, leaden feeling that life is passing them by. . . . Why, these purchasers ask, am I not a glittering presence?  Why do I not have an ostentatiously large and tastelessly furnished house full of sullen hangers-on?

— Colin McEnroe

Psychoanalysis shows the human infant as the passive recipient of love, unable to bear hostility.  Development is learning to love actively and to bear rejection.

— Karl Stern

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself.  But the self is not something that one finds.  It is something that one creates.

— Thomas Szasz

Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.

— Eric Hoffer

Justice is always violent to the offending, for every man is innocent in his own eyes.

— Daniel Defoe

The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.

— Elbert Hubbard