47 Self-Respect Quotes

In a world that often places value on external achievements and the opinions of others, self-respect remains an essential pillar of personal well-being and genuine happiness. It's the inner compass that guides our decisions, shapes our relationships, and influences the way we perceive ourselves. To celebrate the importance of self-respect, we've curated a collection of the top 47 self-respect quotes that inspire and remind us to honor our own worth. Whether you're looking for motivation to boost your self-esteem or wisdom to reinforce your self-worth, these quotes offer profound insights and encouragement. Dive into this empowering compilation and let these timeless words resonate with your journey towards greater self-respect.

1. “Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.” - Marcus Aurelius

2. “When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everyone will respect you.” - Lao Tzu

3. “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

4. “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” - Charlotte Brontë

5. “If You believe in yourself you can reach everything you want.” - Kees Broos

6. “Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage.” - Thucydides

7. “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

8. “They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them.” - Mahatma Gandhi

9. “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

10. “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

11. “For it is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose.” - Marcus Aurelius

12. “Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect” - George Sand

13. “I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.” - Theodore Roosevelt

14. “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

15. “It's easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for competence--such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.” - Ayn Rand

16. “A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack” - Ayn Rand

17. “I cannot conceive of a greater loss than the loss of one's self-respect.” - Mahatma Gandhi

18. “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

19. “You'd be surprised how easy some things can be, things you never thought you'd do, when you take self-respect out of the equation.” - Sarah Addison Allen

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. “Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.” - Hugo Hamilton

22. “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

23. “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

24. “One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.” - Christopher Hitchens

25. “Dare to love yourselfas if you were a rainbowwith gold at both ends.” - Author-Poet Aberjhani

26. “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” - Michel de Montaigne

27. “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

28. “If you want to be respected by others, the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

29. “Respect yourself and others will respect you.” - Confucius

30. “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

31. “When you express "purity" which is the truth about yourself, you feel a love for yourself that is expressed by self-respect, self-esteem, and self-confidence!” - Dr. Tae Yun Kim

32. “One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself.” - Shannon L. Alder

33. “In yourself right now is all the place you've got.” - Flannery O'Connor

34. “Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignation with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards- the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.” - Joan Didion

35. “Many people lack the basic equipment to be in a relationship and there's nothing you can do to change it. You can't take a skunk and dip it in perfume and hope it becomes a puppy. Eventually, the perfume will wear off and you'll still have a skunk on your hands.” - Sherry Argov

36. “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

37. “Why are you drinking? - the little prince asked.- In order to forget - replied the drunkard.- To forget what? - inquired the little prince, who was already feeling sorry for him.- To forget that I am ashamed - the drunkard confessed, hanging his head.- Ashamed of what? - asked the little prince who wanted to help him.- Ashamed of drinking! - concluded the drunkard, withdrawing into total silence.And the little prince went away, puzzled.'Grown-ups really are very, very odd', he said to himself as he continued his journey.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

38. “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

39. “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

40. “No body is worth more than your body” - Melody Carstairs

41. “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.” - Charlotte Brontë

42. “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

43. “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

44. “We all deserve to be treated with nothing but respect. In order to command respect from others, we must first and foremost respect ourselves.” - Julie-Anne

45. “if you think she is amazing, you are the ordinary one ...” - Hera Septyadita

46. “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

47. “our thoughts have to be accountable to our self” - Stefen Dany