Self Perception Quotes

“Forgiveness has nothing to do with absolving a criminal of his crime. It has everything to do with relieving oneself of the burden of being a victim--letting go of the pain and transforming oneself from victim to survivor.”
― C.R. Strahan

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted

“We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us.”
― Virginia Satir

“You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it.”
― Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

“Butterflies can't see their wings. They can't see how truly beautiful they are, but everyone else can. People are like that as well.”
― Naya Rivera

“To realize that you do not understand is a virtue; not to realize that you do not understand is a defect.”
― Lao Tzu

“When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him..”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz

“When you hear men talking," said Cornelia, "all they ever do is speak ill of women. ... And I don't quite know how they managed to make this law in their favour, or who exactly it was who gave them a greater license to sin than is allowed to us; and if the fault is common to both sexes (as they can hardly deny), why should the blame not be as well? What makes them think they can boast of the same thing that in women brings only shame?”
― Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men

“Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. Life would undergo a change of appearance because we ourselves had undergone a change of attitude.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“There's more to clothing than just adornment. It does more than merely change how the world perceives us. It changes how we perceive ourselves.”
― Jacqueline Carey, Naamah's Kiss

“It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good heart whatever they might have to say.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra."

("We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.")”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“The image that concerns most people is the reflection they see in other people's minds.”
― Edward De Bono

“If we cant laugh at ourselves, do we have the right to laugh at others?”
― C.H. Hamel

“But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.”
― Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes

“People are crying up the rich and variegated plumage of the peacock, and he is himself blushing at the sight of his ugly feet.”
― Sa'di

“If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.”
― Alain de Botton

“...all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust”
― Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts / A Cool Million

“What do you mean, Phib?" asked Miss Squeers, looking in her own little glass, where, like most of us, she saw - not herself, but the reflection of some pleasant image in her own brain.”
― Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

“If we accept our fallibility and limitations and remain humble in our social interactions and self-perception, we can release the ego-driven need to always want to have the final say and instead accomplish our pursuit of harmony. ("Esprit d’escalier" - " Staircase Wit")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“But for all of that life-shaping power, race is a mirage, which doesn’t lessen its force. We are what we see ourselves as, whether what we see exists or not. We are what people see us as, whether what they see exists or not. What people see in themselves and others has meaning and manifests itself in ideas and actions and policies, even if what they are seeing is an illusion. Race is a mirage but one that we do well to see, while never forgetting it is a mirage, never forgetting that it’s the powerful light of racist power that makes the mirage.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Our self-worth should come from within, based on our perception of ourselves, not how others perceive us.”
― Sam Izad, Snackable Existentialism: Small Portions, Big Ideas

“Students usually don't refer to themselves as nerds until someone else accuses them of being one.”
― Alexandra Robbins, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School

“Unseeing, even when seen
unfeeling, even when felt,
to those scattered loves
and the abashment that meet the eyes,
I had tried to brush them off
and indeed, had wiped them away.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“The greatest sign of intelligence is realizing that we’re not.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Our identity is wrapped up in what others think of us—or, more accurately, what we think others think of us.”
― Jay Shetty, Domā kā mūks: iemāci prātam mieru un mērķi katru dienu

“You may have lived the better part of your life being told that you’re a sheep, but that never changes the fact that you are the lion that you have always been.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Don’t miss the fact that you are not defined by your own definition, for to do so is to suffocate in the confines of small spaces.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“I had set out to come to know Thomas by walking where he had walked, but he had mostly eluded me, remaining a Lob-like figure glimpsed now and then at a bend on the path or through a hole in the hedge, still enigmatic. And yet I had learnt so much from the people I'd met along my journeys: people for whom, as for Thomas, landscape was intricately involved with self-perception, and for whom certain places or weathers brought yields of grace.”
― Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot