Quotes about Self-respect

I had allowed to settle into the core of who I am. I talked about myself in ways I would never let another person.

And so was this. These words—"Not in my presence will you talk about yourself in this way"—they don't brush off easily. Nor should they. Sometimes a phrase lands in your soul with such weight it leaves the deepest impression. I collect these phrases like other people collect stamps and Beanie Babies. I fill the unlined pages of notebooks from Walmart with these phrases. These words that move me are treasures.

We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.

if you don't stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?

Therefore, pursue your course bravely. Your conscience is at least your own, and to follow it is to be a man; to follow the conscience of another is to be a slave.

Your crown has been bought and paid for. Put it on your head and wear it.

Golden fetters are no less galling to a self-respecting man that iron ones; the sting lies in the fetters, not in the metal.

Humility is to make a right estimate of oneself. It is no humility for a man to think less of himself than he ought.

If you allow men to use you for your own purposes, they will use you for theirs.

Conceited men often seem a harmless kind of men, who, by an overweening self-respect, relieve others from the duty of respecting them at all.

If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value. He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass of people; his existence descended to the level of animal life.

I have undergone too much, my friend, to feel pride or squeamishness now. Except - added Nicholas, hastily, after a short silence - except such squeamishness as is common honesty, and so much pride as constitutes self-respect.