self-perception Quotes

Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery that you really are accepted.

“Maybe that’s what a person’s personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside.”

“No one has said I borrowed the money. I could have got it in some other way. I could have got it from an admirer. When a girl’s as pretty as I am.”

“If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”

“Love gives us a heightened consciousness through which to apprehend the world, but anger gives us a precise, detached perception of its own.”

“In a nutshell, social anxiety is being hyper-aware of how you’re perceived by others and having an overpowering fear/obsession about looking like an idiot.”

“In a way, I guess I thought I didn’t really need to concern myself with this type of thing because compared to him, I don’t come across as ‘threatening,’ you know? I don’t sag my pants or wear my clothes super big. I go to a good school, and have goals and vision and ‘a great head on my shoulders,’ as Mama likes to say.”

“Despite what anybody may have to say to you or about you today, you are enough. Yesterday, you were enough. Today, you are enough. Tomorrow, you’ll be enough. Forever, you’re enough. Change the way you think, baby. Don’t give control over your life, your self-perception, to people who have no business having that kind of power.”

“If I’m fifty-five, I’m fifty-five—that’s what I say.” “Fifty-eight, isn’t it, auntie?” “I was just giving that as an example,” said Mrs. Stevens with great dignity.

I don’t ever expect to be a bride myself. I’m so homely nobody will ever want to marry me—unless it might be a foreign missionary. I suppose a foreign missionary mightn’t be very particular.

Next to being beautiful oneself—and that’s impossible in my case—it would be best to have a beautiful bosom friend.

“I’m sure I don’t know why you should lose your temper like that just because Mrs. Lynde said you were red-haired and homely. You say it yourself often enough.” “Oh, but there’s such a difference between saying a thing yourself and hearing other people say it,” wailed Anne.

Sometimes I have wished I was born a boy, but when I see Moody Spurgeon I’m always glad I’m a girl and not his sister.

“Good men ever interpret themselves too meanly,” said the physician.

“But, not to suggest more obvious reasons, it may be that they are kept silent by the very constitution of their nature. Or,—can we not suppose it?—guilty as they may be, retaining, nevertheless, a zeal for God’s glory and man’s welfare, they shrink from displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men; because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them; no evil of the past be redeemed by better service. So, to their own unutterable torment, they go about among their fellow-creatures, looking pure as new-fallen snow while their hearts are all speckled and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid themselves.”

“I think too much of my looks and hate to work, but won’t any more, if I can help it.”

“I’m not Mr. Laurence, I’m only Laurie.”

“Canst thou deem it, Hester, a consolation, that I must stand up in my pulpit, and meet so many eyes turned upward to my face, as if the light of heaven were beaming from it!—must see my flock hungry for the truth, and listening to my words as if a tongue of Pentecost were speaking!—and then look inward, and discern the black reality of what they idolize?”

“I wish you hadn’t taught me to call Knaves at cards Jacks; and I wish my boots weren’t so thick nor my hands so coarse.

I’m wrong in these clothes. I’m wrong out of the forge, the kitchen, or off th’ meshes. You won’t find half so much fault in me if you think of me in my forge dress, with my hammer in my hand, or even my pipe. You won’t find half so much fault in me if, supposing as you should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in at the forge window and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old anvil, in the old burnt apron, sticking to the old work.

“I am a fair length—a fair length,”

“I am an evil man-cub, and my stomach is sad in me.”

With my rags I ought to wear a cap, any sort of old pancake, but not this grotesque thing.

Excuse me, young man, can you.... No, to put it more strongly and more distinctly; not can you but dare you, looking upon me, assert that I am not a pig?

They say, too, the girl was not at all pretty, in fact I am told positively ugly... and such an invalid... and queer.

“And to be sure you’re right: God has given me a figure that can awaken none but comic ideas in other people; a buffoon;”