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
