Self Esteem Quotes

“I have known friendship love, parental love, romantic love, family love and unrequited love in my life time, but the only love that made a difference was self love. You don't need confirmation from the world or another person that you matter. You simply do matter. When you finally believe that truth and live it then you can do amazing things with your life!”
― Shannon Alder

“Low self-esteem causes me to believe that I have so little worth that my response does not matter. With repentance, however, I understand that being worth so much to God is why my response is so important. Repentance is remedial work to mend our minds and hearts, which get bent by sin.”
― John Ortberg, The Me I Want to Be: Becoming God's Best Version of You

“Often people that settle in life are those that only do what they can with what they have and where they are. Never settle for someone that didn't know your worth from the beginning, or build a life without God in it. Live beyond your low expectations.”
― Shannon l. Alder

“The French girls would tell you, to believe that you were pretty would make you so.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters

“MISERABLE

Release the toxic and infectious-
Spreaders of misery,
Souls destroying souls-
And poisonous liars.

Awaken from the hallucinations-
And take back your heart.
Reclaim your self-esteem-
And leave the toxic be.”
― Giorge Leedy, Uninhibited From Lust To Love

“When you think this pain is all you deserve, you are right. You are the only one that can decide how long you will walk in hell.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“You don't have to be part of a couple to be happy, you know.”
― Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Alice Alone

“No matter how valuable you are and your ideas, fools will certainly play both of you down, so exclude yourselves from the inflammatory environs of fools.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“If you want me, you'll have to earn me. And, mister, I don't come cheap.”
― Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Fancy Pants

“Let us not be trapped by faint discrimination or intolerance preventing us from creating open perspectives. If we rise above the imprisonment of fixed ideas, we make an essential step toward personal growth and self-esteem. (“The infinite Wisdom of Meditation“)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty "fixes" that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time. A thin young woman with precancerous lungs [who smokes to stay thin] is more highly rewarded socially that a hearty old crone. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty used to punish women for their failure to achieve and conform to it]and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization. In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself.”
― Lucille Ball

“What is it that would make a creature as fierce, majestic and powerful as a lion is, subject itself to the intimidation of a man a whip and a chair? The lion has been taught to forget what it is.”
― Iyanla Vanzant, Peace from Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You're Going Through

“The road to your highest achievements leads through environments that support you.”
― Raoul Davis Jr., Firestarters: How Innovators, Instigators, and Initiators Can Inspire You to Ignite Your Own Life

“The beauty myth sets it up this way: A high rating as an art object is the most valuable tribute a woman can exact from her lover. If he appreciates her face and body because it is hers, that is next to worthless. It is very neat: The myth contrives to make women offend men by scrutinizing honest appreciation when they give it; it can make men offend women merely by giving them honest appreciation. It can manage to contaminate the sentence "You're beautiful," which is next to "I love you" in expressing a bond of regard between a woman and a man. A man cannot tell a woman that he loves to look at her without risking making her unhappy. If he never tells her, she is destined to be unhappy. And the "luckiest" woman of all, told she is loved because she's "beautiful," is often tormented because she lacks the security of being desired because she looks like who she lovably is.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“As much as we thirst for approval, we dread condemnation.”
― Hans Selye

“Only those few who are able to surpass their fear of death completely can fully experience the highest forms of life; not the mundane life of the mortal, but the godly life of the resurrected.”
― Zeena Schreck

“People’s confidence in their abilities influences how they approach life. Their dreams are likely anchored to what they feel they can achieve.”
― Raoul Davis Jr., Firestarters: How Innovators, Instigators, and Initiators Can Inspire You to Ignite Your Own Life

“Healthy emotions come in all sizes. Healthy minds come in all sizes. And healthy bodies come in all sizes.”
― Cheri K. Erdman

“Innovators are owners of the situation. They own it because they create it—quite literally. They embrace the world as it should match the vision in their heads. And when something is missing from that vision, they fill the gap.”
― Raoul Davis Jr., Firestarters: How Innovators, Instigators, and Initiators Can Inspire You to Ignite Your Own Life

“It's easier to accept hurt and pain, sometimes, than love and acceptance.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“Don't measure how valuable you are by the way you are treated.”
― Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

“The self-esteem of western women is founded on physical being (body mass index, youth, beauty). This creates a tricky emphasis on image, but the internalized locus of self-worth saves lives. Western men are very different. In externalizing the source of their self-esteem, they surrender all emotional independence. (Conquest requires two parties, after all.) A man cannot feel like a man without a partner, corporation, team. Manhood is a game played on the terrain of opposites. It thus follows that male sense of self disintegrates when the Other is absent.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide

“I will never attend an anti-war rally; if you have a peace rally, invite me.”
― Mother Teresa

“Inside Critics

The critical voices in our own heads are far more vicious than what we might hear from the outside. Our "inside critics" have intimate knowledge of us and can zero in on our weakest spots.

You might be told by the critics that you're too fat, too old, too young, not intelligent enough, a quitter, not logical, prone to try too many things...
It's all balderdash!

Some elements of these may be true, and it's completely up to you how they affect you. Inside critics are really just trying to protect you. You can:

Learn to dialogue with them.
Give them new jobs.
Turn them into allies.
You can also dismantle/exterminate them.”
― Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (SARK), A Creative Companion: How to Free Your Creative Spirit

“Being shy is a symptom of a low self-esteem.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, The Confessions of a Misfit

“I wondered what it was like to feel whole, to not feel torn up or stunned out or wigged out or any of those things. I wondered what it was like to walk around the world looking up at the sky instead of searching the ground, eye to eye with things that crawled.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster

“Beauty in its best form is kindness, the most valuable currency in the world.”
― Rebecca McNutt, Bittersweet Symphony

“Give people time. Give people space. Don’t beg anyone to stay. Let them roam. What’s meant for you will always be yours.”
― Reyna Biddy