Quotations About Self Respect
1. One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself.
2. If you want to be respected by others, the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.
3. If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
4. Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.
5. Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.
6. I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.
7. Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
8. They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them.
9. Staying silent is like a slow growing cancer to the soul and a trait of a true coward. There is nothing intelligent about not standing up for yourself. You may not win every battle. However, everyone will at least know what you stood for—YOU.
10. Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage.
11. I cannot conceive of a greater loss than the loss of one’s self-respect.
12. I cannot compromise my respect for your love. You can keep your love, I will keep my respect.
13. It’s easy to run to others. It’s so hard to stand on one’s own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can’t fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It’s easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It’s simple to seek substitutes for competence–such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.
14. The only person that deserves a special place in your life is someone that never made you feel like you were an option in theirs.
15. People can have their opinions about everything in the world, but people’s opinions end where the tip of my nose begins. Your opinions of others can only go so far as to where their own shoreline is. The world is for your taking, but other people are not. One is only allowed to have an opinion of me, if that person is done educating him/herself on everything about me. Before people educate themselves on everything about you, they’re not allowed to open their venomous mouthes and have an opinion about you.
16. Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
17. Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man’s self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.
18. Hide yourself in God, so when a man wants to find you he will have to go there first.
19. Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it’s not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you’ve been to. I’m not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don’t have to be like anyone else. I’m walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.
20. That’s the big picture, your happiness. And health. You should never care what a man thinks of you — until he demonstrates to you that he cares about making you happy. If he isn’t trying to make you happy, then send him back from “whence” he came because winning him over will have no benefit. At the end of the day, happines, joy…and yes…your emotional stability…those comprise the only measuring stick you really need to have.
21. Love is proved the moment you let go of someone because they need you to.
22. Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect
23. If you don’t know what you want, you’ll never find it.
If you don’t know what you deserve, you’ll always settle for less.
You will wander aimlessly, uncomfortably numb in your comfort zone, wondering how life has ended up here.
Life starts now, live, love, laugh and let your light shine!
24. Once you embrace your value, talents and strengths, it neutralizes when others think less of you.
25. Some of the most beautiful things worth having in your life come wrapped in a crown of thorns.
26. Confidence is knowing who you are and not changing it a bit because of someone’s version of reality is not your reality.
27. Walk tall, or baby don’t walk at all.
28. An open Facebook page is simply a psychiatric dry erase board that screams, “Look at me. I am insecure. I need your reaction to what I am doing, but you’re not cool enough to be my friend. Therefore, I will just pray you see this because the approval of God is not all I need.
29. There is a God part in you. The consciousness. The pure Self. Learn to listen the voice of that Power.
30. She might be without country, without nation, but inside her there was still a being that could exist and be free, that could simply say I am without adding a this, or a that, without saying I am Indian, Guyanese, English, or anything else in the world.
31. There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one’s own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.
32. Respect for self is the beginning of cultivating virtue in men and women.
33. When God takes out the trash, don’t go digging back through it. Trust Him.
34. You are not an option, a choice or a soft place to land after a long battle. You were meant to be the one. If you can wrap yourself around the idea that you are something incredible, then you will stop excusing behavior that rapes your very soul. You were never meant to teach someone to love you. You were meant to be loved.
35. No boundary or barrier surrounds the heart of a person that loves their self and others.
36. You got nothin’ to lose but your self-respect.
37. Self-respect–the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
38. Stand up for who you are. Respect your Self and ignite the divine sparks in you. Access your powers. Choose your rights and work together with others to bring blessings into the lives.
39. Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you, or makes you happy.
40. 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.
41. All my problems bow before my stubbornness.
42. We are not here to match and homogenize and agree on every point. One size of spirituality does not fit all. We are here to be our divine selves, boldly, passionately, respectfully, to the absolute best of our ability — and this, this is more than enough.
43. You’d be surprised how easy some things can be, things you never thought you’d do, when you take self-respect out of the equation.
44. But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind.
45. The people that truly love us in life don’t fight for us to remain a doormat for others.
46. For it is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose.
47. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
48. Many people lack the basic equipment to be in a relationship and there’s nothing you can do to change it. You can’t take a skunk and dip it in perfume and hope it becomes a puppy. Eventually, the perfume will wear off and you’ll still have a skunk on your hands.
49. It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
50. Don’t ever stray from yourself, in order to be close to someone that doesn’t have the courtesy to remind you of your worth, or the integrity of a gentleman to walk you home.
51. Unrequited love is the only emotion that allows sane people to taste the “life sentence” of someone with bipolar disorder. The longer they hang onto a lost cause the more unstable they look to everyone else. They contradict their own belief systems and statements, by circling the drain with two competing emotions—love and hate.
52. A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack
53. The number of chances you give someone doesn’t tell the world how loving you are without telling them how desperate you are to believe they care as much as you. True love resides in the first chance, stupidity in the second, opportunists in the third and scoundrels in the fourth.
54. When you express “purity” which is the truth about yourself, you feel a love for yourself that is expressed by self-respect, self-esteem, and self-confidence!
55. Don’t ever feel bad that someone couldn’t give you all of their heart. Be grateful that you can take the least complicated part of their soul with you, wherever you go. This is more than some people will ever have.
56. I guessed life was like that. You gained and you lost, and if you saved anything from the ruins, even if only a shred of self-respect, it was enough to take you through the next bit.
57. But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units — because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves anymore, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.
58. It is not the hand that rocks the cradle that rules the world; it is the woman that holds the keys to the kingdom.
59. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignation with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards- the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.
60. Diversity of character is due to the unequal time given to values. Only through each other will we see the importance of the qualities we lack and our unfinished soul’s potential.
