40 Self-Respect Quotes
Aug. 27, 2024, 2:45 a.m.
In a world that often tries to define us by external standards, self-respect serves as a crucial anchor to our inner selves. It is the foundation upon which we build healthy relationships, pursue meaningful goals, and maintain our emotional well-being. To remind you of the power of self-respect, we have curated a collection of the top 40 quotes that celebrate and inspire this indispensable virtue. Whether you're seeking motivation, introspection, or a boost in confidence, these quotes will resonate deeply and encourage you to honor yourself every day. Dive in and discover sage wisdom from various thinkers, world leaders, and everyday heroes who understand the true essence of self-respect.
1. “Self-respect--the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.” - H.L. Mencken
2. “Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.” - Marcus Aurelius
3. “When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everyone will respect you.” - Lao Tzu
4. “LOVE of others is the appreciation of one's self. MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.” - Mina Loy
5. “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.” - Joan Didion
6. “But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units -- because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves anymore, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails.” - John Steinbeck
7. “If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.” - Jack Kornfield
8. “Respect for self is the beginning of cultivating virtue in men and women.” - Gordon B. Hinckley
9. “Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity growswith the ability to say no to oneself.” - Abraham Joshua Heschel
10. “If You believe in yourself you can reach everything you want.” - Kees Broos
11. “In youth, it was a way I had,To do my best to please.And change, with every passing ladTo suit his theories.But now I know the things I knowAnd do the things I do,And if you do not like me so,To hell, my love, with you.” - Dorothy Parker
12. “There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.” - Thomas Mann
13. “Our thinking will automatically improve when we remember the words of Paul: 'know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and the spirit of God dwelleth in you?” - Thomas S. Monson
14. “For it is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose.” - Marcus Aurelius
15. “It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.” - Thomas Paine
16. “A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack” - Ayn Rand
17. “I guessed life was like that. You gained and you lost, and if you saved anything from the ruins, even if only a shred of self-respect, it was enough to take you through the next bit.” - Dick Francis
18. “I cannot conceive of a greater loss than the loss of one's self-respect.” - Mahatma Gandhi
19. “We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.” - Hunter S. Thompson
20. “She might be without country, without nation, but inside her there was still a being that could exist and be free, that could simply say I am without adding a this, or a that, without saying I am Indian, Guyanese, English, or anything else in the world.” - Sharon Maas
21. “You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right -- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don't. It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, beacuse the clouds let him; they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him. You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.” - Toni Morrison
22. “About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.” - Christopher Hitchens
23. “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” - Michel de Montaigne
24. “Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.” - Aung San Suu Kyi
25. “Walk tall, or baby don't walk at all.” - Bruce Springsteen
26. “I grant men the land, the government, the wealth, all the chances. I accept that you have to hold all the cards, since that's the only way you know how to play; but I refuse to swallow your disrespect.” - Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
27. “In yourself right now is all the place you've got.” - Flannery O'Connor
28. “There are certain phrases potent to make my blood boil -- improper influence! What old woman's cackle is that?""Are you a young lady?""I am a thousand times better: I am an honest woman, and as such I will be treated.” - Charlotte Brontë
29. “We are not here to match and homogenize and agree on every point. One size of spirituality does not fit all. We are here to be our divine selves, boldly, passionately, respectfully, to the absolute best of our ability — and this, this is more than enough.” - sera break
30. “Davellon may be a village, but the Davellon House can be anything you make it. Nobility has to start somewhere. It might as well start with you. Let nobody look down on you, for whatever reason, My Lord. Titles are granted or inherited, nobility isn't.~Tenaxos I to Landar Parmingh, Baron Davellon” - Andrew Ashling
31. “Stuck in my own trap of writing about a nonsubject, I think I can defend my own self-respect, and also the integrity of a lost girl, by saying two things. First, the trivial doings of Paris Hilton are of no importance to me, or anyone else, and I should not be forced to contemplate them. Second, she should be left alone to lead such a life as has been left to her. If this seems paradoxical, then very well.” - Christopher Hitchens
32. “You got nothin' to lose but your self-respect.” - Wendelin Van Draanen
33. “One of the causes of unhappiness among intellectuals in the present day is that so many of them, especially those whose skill is literary, find no opportunity for the independent exercise of their talents, but have to hire themselves out to rich corporations directed by Philistines, who insist upon their producing what they themselves regard as pernicious nonsense. If you were to inquire among journalists in either England or America whether they believed in the policy of the newspaper for which they worked, you would find, I believe, that only a small minority do so; the rest, for the sake of a livelihood, prostitute their skill to purposes which they believe to be harmful. Such work cannot bring any real satisfaction, and in the course of reconciling himself to the doing of it, a man has to make himself so cynical that he can no longer derive whole-hearted satisfaction from anything whatever. I cannot condemn men who undertake work of this sort, since starvation is too serious an alternative, but I think that where it is possible to do work that is satisfactory to man’s constructive impulses without entirely starving, he will be well advised from the point of view of his own happiness if he chooses it in preference to work much more highly paid but not seeming to him worth doing on its own account. Without self-respect genuine happiness is scarcely possible. And the man who is ashamed of his work can hardly achieve self-respect.” - Bertrand Russell
34. “When gods die, self-respect buds', murmured Orland Fank. 'Gods and their examples are not needed by those who respect themselves and, consequently, respect others. Gods are for children, for little, fearful people, for those who would have no responsibility to themselves or their fellows.” - Michael Moorcock
35. “No body is worth more than your body” - Melody Carstairs
36. “The treasure shouldn't do the hunting, and you're a treasure.” - Ed Asner
37. “Freedom is not an abstaction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more is not enough either. Having less, being less, empoverished in freedom and rights, women then invariably have less self-respect: less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life.” - Andrea Dworkin
38. “To stand by yourself -- that was also part of dignity. That way, a person could get through a public flaying with dignity. Galileo. Luther. Even somebody who admitted his guilt and resisted the temptation to deny it. Something politicians couldn't do. Honesty, the courage for honesty. With others and yourself.” - Pascal Mercier
39. “Staying silent is like a slow growing cancer to the soul and a trait of a true coward. There is nothing intelligent about not standing up for yourself. You may not win every battle. However, everyone will at least know what you stood for—YOU.” - Shannon L. Alder
40. “Taking care of yourself is one of the hardest jobs -- don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise. It's much easier to take care of others.” - Charity Shumway
