Abraham J. Heschel:

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.

Aldous Huxley:

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh:

If one is estranged from oneself, then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

Blaise Pascal:

We are all something, but none of us are everything.

Bonaro W. Overstreet:

Perhaps the most important thing we can undertake toward the reduction of fear is to make it easier for people to accept themselves, to like themselves.

Cardinal De Retz:

A man who doesn't trust himself can never really trust anyone else.

Eleanor Roosevelt:

I think somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Eric Hoffer:

The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor's shortcomings as he is of his own.

Frederick Douglass:

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.

Jane Haddam:

In my day, we didn't have self-esteem, we had self-respect, and no more of it than we had earned.

Jane Nelson:

Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?

Joan Didion:

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

Joan Didion:

Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.

Marian Wright Edelman:

No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.

Marianne Williamson:

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Mark Twain:

The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.

Meredith Jordan:

Whatever you have forgotten, you can remember. Whatever you have buried you can unearth. If you are willing to look deep into your own nature, if you are willing to peel away the layers of not-self you have adopted in making your way through the tribulations of life, you will find that your true self is not as far removed as you think.

Michel de Montaigne:

I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.

Sidonie Gruenberg:

To value his own good opinion, a child has to feel that he is a worthwhile person. He has to have confidence in himself as an individual.

Virginia Woolf:

Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.

William J. H. Boetcker:

That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.

e. e. cummings:

We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.