Quotes
207 Enriching Self Esteem Quotes To Nurture The Soul
When I was younger, especially in my teenage years, I suffered from a distinct lack of self-esteem. I just couldn’t put myself into situations where I could be challenged, either by myself or with others.
It’s from there that I started my personal development journey and came to (mostly) overcome my lack of self-esteem. And you know what? These quotes really did help me through that process.
I found myself more stable and happier with a strong foundation to go onwards to do bigger things in my life. That includes starting Execute Resources and several other empowering projects under the Execute brand.
So for me, it’s a real pleasure to bring you these quotes about raising your self-esteem and overcoming your negative self-talk. These words of wisdom worked for me, and I wish to inspire you to break free and move past your low self-esteem.
May you bring into your life everything that you truly deserve.
1. Love who you are, embrace who you are.
Lilly Singh
2. A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
Mark Twain
3. The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don’t love yourself, who will?
Naval Ravikant
4. Don’t waste your energy trying to change opinions… Do your thing, and don’t care if they like it.
Tina Fey
5. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
6. Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another stepping stone to greatness.
Oprah
7. Don’t tell yourself some bullsh*t story about you can’t do this or that. Don’t even allow yourself to say you’re not good enough. Sure, maybe you can’t do something yet, and maybe you’ll never be the greatest of all time. But who gives a sh*t?
Tom Bilyeu
8. No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt
9. Self-esteem is made up primarily of two things: feeling lovable and feeling capable.
Jack Canfield
10. Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life, but define yourself.
Harvey Fierstein
11. Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your handbreak on.
Maxwell Maltz
12. It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
Sir Edmund Hillary
13. The loudest critic is internal.
James Clear
14. Lighten up on yourself. No one is perfect. Gently accept your humanness.
Deborah Day
15. Everyone is lying – about what they make, about how confident they feel, about how hard they work, about how well things are going. Stop comparing yourself to these lies. Stop thinking about them at all.
Ryan Holiday
16. You have to believe in yourself when no one else does – that makes you a winner right here.
Venus Williams
17. The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.
Mark Twain
18. It is never too late to be what you might have been.
George Eliot
19. Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion.
Sam Altman
20. If you do not respect your own wishes, no one else will. You will simply attract people who disrespect you as much as you do.
Vironika Tugaleva
21. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates his fate.
Henry David Thoreau
22. Talk about your failures without apologizing.
Brené Brown
23. Other people’s opinion of you does not have to become your reality.
Les Brown
24. Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don’t be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren’t paying any attention to you.
Eleanor Roosevelt
25. If we really love ourselves, everything in our life works.
Louise Hay
26. When you recover or discover something that nourishes your soul and brings joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life.
Jean Shinoda Bolen
27. One’s dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but it can never be taken away unless it is surrendered.
Michael J. Fox
28. There are so many more important things to worry about than how you’re perceived by strangers.
Dennis Lehane
29. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.
Ayn Rand
30. So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
Alan Watts
31. We are each gifted in a unique and important way. It is our privilege and our adventure to discover our own special light.
Mary Dunbar
32. Eliminate the need to be liked. Replace it with the intention to be of service, whether to others, something you believe in, or your highest self.
Neil Strauss
33. It’s all about falling in love with yourself and sharing that love with someone who appreciates you, rather than looking for love to compensate for a self-love deficit.
Eartha Kitt
34. We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glow-worm.
Winston Churchill
35. I used to hate feeling embarrassed, but then I realized nobody’s watching and nobody gives a damn.
Barbara Corcoran
36. Don’t belittle yourself. Be BIG yourself.
Corita Kent
37. The world can only see us as we see ourselves.
David Hawkins
38. As you grow in self-esteem, your face, manner, way of talking and moving will tend naturally to project the pleasure you take in being alive.
Nathaniel Branden
39. The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
Michel de Montaigne
40. People who want the most approval get the least and the people who need approval the least get the most.
Wayne Dyer
41. Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.
Marilyn Monroe
42. Understand: You should be radiating confidence, not arrogance or disdain.
Robert Greene
43. He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
44. Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
45. If you want your children to improve, let them overhear the nice things you say about them to others.
Haim Ginott
46. Successful people have fear, successful people have doubts, and successful people have worries. They just don’t let these feelings stop them.
T. Harv Eker
47. Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.
Benjamin Spock
48. At every given moment we are absolutely perfect for what is required for our journey.
Steve Maraboli
49. Who would you impress if the world was blind?
Shannon L. Alder
50. Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.
André Gide
51. We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our worst enemy.
Roderick Thorp
52. You can have anything you want if you are willing to give up the belief that you can’t have it.
Dr. Robert Anthony
53. One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself.
Shannon L. Alder
54. I found in my research that the biggest reason people aren’t more self-compassionate is that they are afraid they’ll become self-indulgent. They believe self-criticism is what keeps them in line. Most people have gotten it wrong because our culture says being hard on yourself is the way to be.
Kristen Neff
55. Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
Dr. Seuss
56. When you’re different, sometimes you don’t see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the person who doesn’t.
Jodi Picoult
57. When you undervalue what you do, the world will undervalue who you are.
Oprah Winfrey
58. Whatever you are doing, love yourself for doing it. Whatever you are feeling, love yourself for feeling it.
Thaddeus Golas
59. You either walk inside your story and own it or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.
Brené Brown
60. To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
Joan Didion
61. 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.
Frederick Douglass
62. It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else’s eyes.
Sally Field
63. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
Audre Lorde
64. When you stop living your life based on what others think of you real life begins. At that moment, you will finally see the door of self-acceptance opened.
Shannon L. Alder
65. Stop comparing your life to everyone around you.
Eric Thomas
66. Self-love is an ocean and your heart is a vessel. Make it full, and any excess will spill over into the lives of the people you hold dear. But you must come first.
Beau Taplin
67. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself.
Lucille Ball
68. Who you are inside is what helps you make and do everything in life.
Fred Rogers
69. It’s surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you’re not comfortable within yourself, you can’t be comfortable with others.
Sidney J. Harris
70. If you don’t believe in yourself, no one will do it for you.
Kobe Bryant
71. Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.
Richard Bach
72. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be… or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be.
Pema Chödrön
73. Why should we worry about what others think of us, do we have more confidence in their opinions than we do our own?
Brigham Young
74. The world will never value you more than you value yourself.
Bill Masur
75. Self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.
Nathaniel Branden
76. One who knows himself is never disturbed by what you think about him.
Osho
77. Beauty begins the moment you decided to be yourself.
Coco Chanel
78. The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours – it is an amazing journey – and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins.
Bob Moawad
79. Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.
Lucille Ball
80. Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who holds a low opinion of himself.
Anthony Trollope
81. Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.
Eleanor Roosevelt
82. The strongest single factor in acquiring abundance is self-esteem: believing you can do it, believing you deserve it, believing you will get it.
Jerry Gillies
83. The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
Carl Gustav Jung
84. You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.
Eckhart Tolle
85. Love yourself. When you love yourself, people can pick up on that: they can see confidence, they can see self-esteem, and naturally, people gravitate towards you.
Lilly Singh
86. Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.
Peter T. McIntyre
87. When people appear to be something other than good and decent, it is only because they are reacting to stress, pain, or the deprivation of basic human needs such as security, love, and self-esteem.
Abraham Maslow
88. One of the hardest expressions of self-assertiveness is challenging your limiting beliefs.
Nathaniel Branden
89. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.
Dr. Seuss
90. It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
91. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
Buddha
92. Telling yourself you like the way you look is easy. Believing it is an entirely different kettle of whales.
Andrew Bias
93. If only you could sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.
Fred Rogers
94. She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.
Anais Nin
95. When you feel good about yourself, others will feel good about you, too.
Jake Steinfield
96. Measure your self-worth not with the balance of your bank account but with the frequency of your generosity.
Haemin Sunim
97. My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.
Henry Ford
98. Ask for what you want. You usually won’t get it, and often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it works surprisingly well.
Sam Altman
99. There is overwhelming evidence that the higher the level of self-esteem, the more likely one will be to treat others with respect, kindness, and generosity.
Nathaniel Branden
100. One of the most courageous things you can do is identify yourself, know who you are, what you believe in and where you want to go.
Shiela Murray Bethel
101. You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
Maya Angelou
102. Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.
Malcolm S. Forbes
103. I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent – no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.
Seneca
104. Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.
Marie Curie
105. Confidence is knowing who you are and not changing it a bit because of someone’s version of reality is not your reality.
Shannon L. Alder
106. Self-esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it.
Gloria Steinem
107. We love seeing raw truth and openness in other people, but we’re afraid to let them see it in us. We’re afraid that our truth isn’t enough – that what we have to offer isn’t enough without the bells and whistles, without editing, and impressing.
Brené Brown
108. Self-talk reflects your innermost feelings.
Dr. Asa Don Brown
109. A person’s self-esteem has nothing to do with how she looks.
Halle Berry
110. Trust yourself. Think for yourself. Act for yourself. Speak for yourself. Be yourself. Imitation is suicide.
Marva Collins
111. Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one’s own sunshine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
112. There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anaïs Nin
113. To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
114. Be strong enough to stand alone, smart enough to know when you need help, and brave enough to ask it.
Ziad K. Abedelnour
115. Put all excuses aside and remember this: you are capable.
Zig Ziglar
116. Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Howard Washington Thurman
117. If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.
T. Harv Eker
118. You can overcome whatever is going on around you if you believe in the light that lives within you.
Justine Edward
119. If you can dream it, you can do it.
Walt Disney
120. To fall in love with yourself is the first secret to happiness.
Robert Morley
121. I am beginning to measure myself in strength, not pounds. Sometimes in smiles.
Laurie Halse Anderson
122. The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
William James
123. Don’t let mental blocks control you. Set yourself free. Confront your fear and turn the mental blocks into building blocks.
Dr Roopleen
124. Retrieve your self-esteem so it is not dependent on how they do or don’t respond to you. You are enough. You are worthy.
Thema Bryant-Davis
125. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself.
Maya Angelou
126. Tell your struggling self, I love you so much.
Haemin Sunim
127. I don’t entirely approve of some of the things I have done, or am, or have been. But I’m me. God knows, I’m me.
Elizabeth Taylor
128. That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem.
Samuel Johnson
129. The only thing that matters in life, is your own opinion about yourself.
Osho
130. People may flatter themselves just as much by thinking that their faults are always present to other people’s minds, as if they believe that the world is always contemplating their individual charms and virtues.
Elizabeth Gaskell
131. Hesitation puts obstacles in your path, boldness eliminates them.
Robert Greene
132. Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.
Norman Vincent Peale
133. A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her.
David Brinkley
134. Don’t let anyone make you feel that you don’t deserve the good things that happen in your life.
Paulo Coelho
135. It’s not what you say out of your mouth that determines your life, it’s what you whisper to yourself that has the most power!
Robert T. Kiyosaki
136. Never bend your head. Hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.
Helen Keller
137. The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
138. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world making the most of one’s best.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
139. Be careful, ever so careful, in trumpeting your own achievements, and always talk less about yourself than about other people. Modesty is generally preferable.
Robert Greene
140. You’re always with yourself, so you might as well enjoy the company.
Diane Von Furstenberg
141. Your own level of excitement and self-belief will convince people that you know where you are going and should be followed.
Robert Greene
142. Confidence is a habit that can be developed by acting as if you already had the confidence you desire to have.
Brian Tracy
143. I hope you’re able to grow to respect whoever you are inside.
Fred Rogers
144. We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.
Swami Vivekananda
145. If you want to see the love of your life, look in the mirror.
Byron Katie
146. Our self-respect tracks our choices. Every time we act in harmony with our authentic self and our heart, we earn our respect. It is that simple. Every choice matters.
Dan Coppersmith
147. There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.
Ernest Hemingway
148. The most difficult secret for a man to keep is the opinion he has of himself.
Marcel Pagnol
149. Nothing so blights our self-esteem as to disapprove of what we once approved.
François de La Rochefoucauld
150. At the core of your heart, you are perfect and pure. No one and nothing can alter that.
Amit Ray
151. It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.
James Baldwin
152. If you know what you’re worth, then go out and get what you’re worth, but you’ve got to be willing to take the hits.
Rocky Balboa
153. The first step toward being loved is learning to love what you see when you look in the mirror.
Tadahiko Nagao
154. Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.
M. Scott Peck
155. Your task is not to seek for Love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Rumi
156. Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.
Martha Gellhorn
157. When you truly understand your worth, you feel an obligation to give your gift to the world.
Bill Masur
158. A good self-esteem level is mostly dependant on how we value ourselves without any bias.
Stephen Richards
159. Respect your uniqueness, and drop comparison. Relax into your being.
Osho
160. The greatest success is successful self-acceptance.
Ben Sweet
161. I never loved another person the way I loved myself.
Mae West
162. We only value ourselves as others value us, for it might be said that we hold ourselves in trust for others.
Charles Palliser
163. My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
164. Your sense of self-worth comes from you alone – never the opinion of others.
Robert Greene
165. Accept yourself, love yourself, and keep moving forward. If you want to fly, you have to give up what weighs you down.
Roy T. Bennett
166. Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.
Samuel Butler
167. To establish true self-esteem we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives.
Denis Waitley
168. It is weakness that is the source of all selfishness.
Swami Vivekananda
169. Self-esteem is not a luxury; it is a profound spiritual need.
Nathaniel Branden
170. Don’t base your identity on your imperfection. You aren’t your imperfections, you are the being that is aware of your imperfections.
Haemin Sunim
171. I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.
Edward Everett Hale
172. A human being wants something that will fill the holes he feels within himself.
James Pierce
173. Much of your self-esteem doesn’t come from what happens to you on a given day or what somebody says, but what you know about yourself on the inside.
Dr. Judy Ho
174. Everything that happens to you is a reflection of what you believe about yourself. We cannot outperform our level of self-esteem. We cannot draw to ourselves more than we think we are worth.
Iyanla Vanzant
175. Believe whatever you need to believe to do your best work.
Sahil Lavingia
176. Find the love you seek, by first finding the love within yourself. Learn to rest in that place within you that is your true home.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
177. The confidence which we have in ourselves gives birth to much of that which we have in others.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
178. Nothing has transformed my life more than realizing that it’s a waste of time to evaluate my worthiness by weighing the reaction of the people in the stands.
Brené Brown
179. For it is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose.
Marcus Aurelius
180. Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
Thomas Jefferson
181. If everybody likes you, you are doing it wrong.
Ben Michaelis
182. Believe in yourself up here and it will make you stronger than you could ever imagine.
Sarah Dessen
183. Love yourself enough to set boundaries. Your time and energy are precious. You get to choose how you use it. You teach people how to treat you by deciding what you will and won’t accept.
Anna Taylor
184. The starting point of building your self-esteem is for you to have a clear sense of who you are and what you want.
Brian Tracy
185. Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.
Dale Carnegie
186. The more you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you like discovering yourself.
James Hilton
187. Feeling good about ourselves is essential in our being able to love others.
Fred Rogers
188. Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.
ALbert Einstein
189. Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction.
Margaret Thatcher
190. The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.
Rita Mae Brown
191. The better you feel about yourself, the less you feel the need to show off.
Robert Hand
192. Shame is the most powerful, master emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough.
Brené Brown
193. I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.
Henry James
194. No matter how hard you try, there is always some guy or girl who achieves more. My attitude is, so what? Does any of us need to be at the very top of the whole world? It’s ridiculous.
Charlie Munger
195. When we fulfil our function, which is to truly love ourselves and share love with others, then true happiness sets in.
Bagrielle Bernstein
196. Don’t be distracted by criticism. Remember: the only taste of success some people have is when they take a bite out of you.
Zig Ziglar
197. Appreciation and self-love are the most important tools that you could ever nurture. Appreciation of others, and the appreciation of yourself is the closest vibrational match to your Source Energy of anything that we’ve ever witnessed anywhere in the Universe.
Abraham
198. Your fear of looking stupid is making you look stupid. What other people think of you is none of your business.
Thibaut
199. Real self-worth comes from mastery, from getting good at something. It doesn’t matter what. Then you don’t have to worry about empty compliments. You don’t worry about what other people think. You have self-respect.
Albert Borris
200. You’ve been criticising yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.
Louise Hay
201. All things splendid have been achieved by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance.
Bruce Barton
202. The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
Robert Hughes
203. Be yourself, you’re already fully equipped to succeed at that.
Rob Liano
204. If we can acquire an attitude of self-belief, then we will surely determine our future actions and our future life opportunities.
Stephen Richards
205. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Marianne Williamson
206. Never let the opinion of another affect your opinion of yourself.
Teresa Mummert
207. No one actually knows what the hell they’re doing. Everyone is just working off their current best guess.
Mark Manson
