Self Doubt Quotes

The first night in the hospital with a snuffling baby girl, I learned that my family was not the only thing that had expanded. There was now a whole new world of opportunities for judgment and self-doubt.

~ Anna White

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

~ Alain De Botton

There is stability in walking an uncertain path, because you never allow yourself to be misled by what you think you know.

~ A.j. Darkholme

Que sais je? [What do I know?]

~ Montaigne

The hardest period in life is one’s twenties. It’s a shame because you’re your most gorgeous, and you’re physically in peak condition. But it’s actually when you’re most insecure and full of self-doubt. When you don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s frightening.

~ Helen Mirren

I feel ugly” I said and you looked at me as if I spoke a different language. There are things you will never understand and if there were words to describe the rapture that takes place in my head from time to time I would put my hand in front of your eyes to protect you from all the ugliness in the world. I kept my eyes on the streetlights outside the window and you kissed every inch of my body as if you could kiss the pain away.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Because his art is sucha difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the worldas visibly as do his neighbors: while his best friends from highschool or college are becoming junior partners in prestigiouslaw firms, or opening their own mortuaries, the writer may bestill sweating out his first novel.

~ John Gardner

... And I wondered if we had disappointed God so much, that he wrote us off as pets, just alive to entertain.

~ Bethany Brookbank

Never allow opinions of others to disturb your inner tranquillity.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!

~ Philip Roth

If someone wants to be in your life they will find you. If they don't they will find an excuse.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Criticism is just someone else’s opinion. Even people who are experts in their fields are sometimes wrong. It is up to you to choose whether to believe some of it, none of it, or all of it. What you think is what counts.

~ Rodolfo Costa

He recalls a lot of family worry about what he was going to do, and while he still sent in the occasional sketch to radio shows, he acknowledges that his confidence was extremely low. Despite his subsequent success and wealth, this propensity for a lack of confidence has continued.“I have terrible periods of lack of confidence,” he explains. “I just don’t believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view. I briefly did therapy, but after a while I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather—you just have to get on with it.”So has that approach helped him? “Not necessarily,” he shrugs.

~ Douglas Adams

In graduate school, early on, I once overheard a classmate talking in her office as I walked by. She didn't know I was there. She was gossiping about me to a group of our classmates & said I was the affirmative-action student...Rationally, I know it was absurd, but hearing how she & maybe others saw me hurt real bad...I stopped joking about being a slacker. I tripled the number of projects I was involved with. I was excellent most of the time. I fell short some of the time. I made sure I got good grades. I made sure my comprehensive exams were solid. I wrote conference proposals & had them accepted. I published. I designed an overly ambitious research project for my dissertation that kind of made me want to die. No matter what I did, I heard that girl, that girl who had accomplished a fraction of a fraction of what I had, telling a group of our peers I was the one who did not deserve to be in our program.

~ Roxane Gay

I loved Monty Python for the wordplay--this sense that you didn’t have to squash your intelligence to be funny. In fact, you could walk right into your intelligence and nerdiness and self-doubt, and that could be funny.

~ George Saunders

A person raised in a healthy family is equipped to live a confident and independent life, someone from an unhealthy family is filled with fear and self-doubt. He has difficulty with the prospect of life without someone else. The devaluing messages of control and manipulation create dependency so those who most need to leave their family of origin are the least equipped to do so.

~ Christina Enevoldsen

I couldn’t trust my own emotions. Which emotional reactions were justified, if any? And which ones were tainted by the mental illness of BPD? I found myself fiercely guarding and limiting my emotional reactions, chastising myself for possible distortions and motivations. People who had known me years ago would barely recognize me now. I had become quiet and withdrawn in social settings, no longer the life of the party. After all, how could I know if my boisterous humor were spontaneous or just a borderline desire to be the center of attention? I could no longer trust any of my heart felt beliefs and opinions on politics, religion, or life. The debate queen had withered. I found myself looking at every single side of an issue unable to come to any conclusions for fear they might be tainted. My lifelong ability to be assertive had turned into a constant state of passivity.

~ Rachel Reiland

your only barriers are what you let it be

~ Gino Norris

Trapped. Sinking. Can't be myself. Made into what other people expect. Is that everyone's fate? Were the great individualists the products of their friends who wanted a great individualist as a friend?

~ Michael Moorcock

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.

~ William Shakespeare

Knowing when and how to change course is important to success. Self-doubt is a lighthouse that will keep you from running aground. Don't become shipwrecked on the rocks of time. Be willing to rethink your decisions and change course.

~ Harley King

There are ways to do things, ways to act with people, and I do not understand them. I cannot understand what people mean when they talk. I do not do things right. I do not feel things right. I do not see things right. I am not...I'm not made of the same thing as everyone else.'The baker took in a deep breath. 'I think if you'll look around, my boy,' he said gently, 'you'll find that no one is quite right. But we all do the best we can.

~ Anne Ursu

The worst weapon of your enemy, rival, competitor, distractor is creating self-doubt in you and/or your team. They cannot win you without first destroying your self-worth.

~ Assegid Habtewold

A youth is susceptible to the influence of idealist notions. As a person ages, they notice a gap between their expectations and reality and they grow more pessimistic about the world and their ability to live up to the lofty notions that inspired a younger self.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Most haters are stuck in a poisonous mental prison of jealousy and self-doubt that blinds them to their own potentiality.

~ Steve Maraboli

Fear and self-doubt are the greatest killers of personal genius.

~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

It doesn’t matter if I’m off the beat. It doesn’t matter if I’m snapping to the rhythm. It doesn’t matter if I look like a complete goon when I dance. It is my dance. It is my moment. It is mine. And dance I will. Try and stop me. You’ll probably get kicked in the face.

~ Dan Pearce

Maybe he would see me as weak and stupid. Maybe he was right.

~ Leslea Tash

Who hasn't asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?

~ Clarice Lispector

Powerlessness is such a lure, such a poisonous lure.

~ Carolyn Ives Gilman

Manifestation blossoms when we turn down or tune out doubtful noise.

~ T.f. Hodge

Comfort...was the key ingredient to making the prisoner crave the prison.

~ Ashim Shanker

Yolanda Gampel utilizes an expanded concept of the uncanny to outline the results of violence: Those who experience such traumas are faced with an unbelievable and unreal reality that is incompatible with anything they knew previously. As a result, they can no longer fully believe what they see with their own eyes; they have difficulty distinguishing between the unreal reality they have survived and the fears that spring from their own imagination.

~ Nicole Waller

I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.

~ George Eliot

To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn't a metaphor. It was the greatest failing on everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings.

~ Robyn Schneider

You may experience waves of disbelief after each memory you retrieve. Whether as a phase or waves, the disbelief is usually accompanied by massive self-hate and guilt. ‘How can I even think such a thing? I must really be warped,’ you tell yourself.

~ Renee Fredrickson