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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“...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

“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

“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

“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

“From the start, our environment shapes who we are. We don't always see it, but we are similarly influenced by what the people around us believe.”
― C.B. Lansdell, Far Removed

“But maybe, I miss who I was.
The capacity I held to be myself.
Beyond the burden of years, and silent deaths of versions
That no longer hold true.”
― Devika Todi

“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

“It is not only true that the less a man thinks of himself, the more he thinks of his good luck
and of all the gifts of God. It is also true that he sees more of the things themselves when he sees
more of their origin; for their origin is a part of them and indeed the most important part of them.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“Pensavo fosse paura di cadere, ma in realtà era soltanto che non sapevo più chi ero. E le cose con cui ero abituata a riempire quel voto non funzionavano più, servivano solo a farmi sentire ancora più alienata da me stessa.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“But don't we all want to be in the presence of someone who makes us feel larger and better than what we can ourselves imagine we could ever be?”
― Gayl Jones, The Birdcatcher

“And that's what I was then. I was a ghost.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“I was oblivion.”
― Gabino Iglesias, The Devil Takes You Home

“The womanliness of my forties had fallen from me, along with my curls, my little double chin and my rounded hips. At the same time I lost the awareness of being a woman. My body, more skillful than myself, had adapted itself and limited the burdens of my femininity to a minimum. I could simply forget I was a woman. Sometimes I was a child in search of strawberries, or a young man sawing wood, or, when sitting on the bench holding Pearl in my scrawny lap watching the setting sun, I was a very old, sexless creature. Today the peculiar charm that emanated from me back then has left me entirely. I am still scrawny, but muscular, and my face is crisscrossed with tiny wrinkles. I'm not ugly, but neither am I attractive, more like a tree than a person, a rough brown branch that needs its whole strength to survive.”
― Marlen Haushofer, The Wall

“The mirror of our mind always shrinks our reflection.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough