49 Self-Esteem Boosting Quotes

In a world that often challenges our sense of self-worth, nurturing our self-esteem is more important than ever. Embracing positive affirmations and inspirational words can serve as a powerful tool to build confidence and foster a healthy self-image. This carefully curated collection of 49 self-esteem boosting quotes is designed to uplift and inspire you, offering a daily reminder of your unique value and potential. Whether you're seeking a quick confidence boost or a deeper reflection on self-acceptance, these quotes will serve as a beacon of encouragement, motivating you to embrace your true self with unwavering confidence. Dive in and let these words ignite a renewed sense of self-belief and empowerment.

1. “Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.” - Andre Gide

2. “Each star is a mirror reflecting the truth inside you.” - Aberjhani

3. “Self-talk reflects your innermost feelings.” - Dr. Asa Don Brown

4. “Beauty when unadorned is adorned the most.” - St Jerome

5. “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

6. “Let me ask you something, in all the years that you have...undressed in front of a gentleman has he ever asked you to leave? Has he ever walked out and left? No? It's because he doesn't care! He's in a room with a naked girl, he just won the lottery. I am so tired of saying no, waking up in the morning and recalling every single thing I ate the day before, counting every calorie I consumed so I know just how much self loathing to take into the shower. I'm going for it. I have no interest in being obese, I'm just through with the guilt. So this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to finish this pizza, and then we are going to go watch the soccer game, and tomorrow we are going to go on a little date and buy ourselves some bigger jeans.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

7. “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

8. “You almost have to step outside yourself and look at you as if you were someone else you really care about and really want to protect. Would you let someone take advantage of that person? Would you let someone use that person you really care about? Or would you speak up for them? If it was someone else you care about, you'd say something. I know you would. Okay, now put yourself back in that body. That person is you. Stand up and tell 'em, "Enough!” - Queen Latifah

9. “When I loved myself enough, I let the tomboy in me swing off the rope in Jackass Canyon. Yes!” - Kim McMillen

10. “If you don't like yourself, you can't like other people. -- Lazarus Long.” - Robert A. Heinlein

11. “Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.” - George Santayana

12. “But now that she had achieved knighthood, and thought and acted as she wanted and decided, for one has to act in this way in order to save this world, she neither noticed nor cared that all the people around her thought she was insane.” - Kathy Acker

13. “I am beginning to measure myself in strength, not pounds. Sometimes in smiles.” - Laurie Halse Anderson

14. “When virtues are pointed out first, flaws seem less insurmountable.” - Judith Martin

15. “When our feet talk to us, we listen.” - Alexander Nestoiter

16. “People like us, we think differently, don't we? We are different. We do all the things that others do. But when it comes down to it, we don't need anyone else. We're happy doing what we do and having obligation interferes with that. And sometimes I think we don't even need ourselves. What's most important is to find out whether we're right or not.” - Simon Morden

17. “I’m ALL about the Alternative.” - Solange nicole

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

19. “There was a time I stopped talking, just like you. My reasons were a little bit different, but... I think the feelings of being ashamed of myself and hating myself... are the same. Here it says "to like yourself." What does that mean? Good things---how are you supposed to find them? I only know things that I hate about myself. Because that's all I know: I hate myself. Even if your force yourself to find good things... it feels so empty. It doesn't work that way. People like your teacher just don't get it.I think... when you hear someone say they like you for the first time... then you can begin to like yourself. I think when someone accepts you for the first time... you feel like you can forgive yourself a little. You can begin to face your fears.~Yuki” - Natsuki Takaya

20. “But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked” (Luke 6:35).” - Michele Woolley

21. “Never shall a young man,Thrown into despairBy those great honey-colouredRamparts at your ear,Love you for yourself aloneAnd not your yellow hair.” - W.B. Yeats

22. “Western women have been controlled by ideals and stereotypes as much as by material constraints.” - Naomi Wolf

23. “Even the models we see in magazines wish they could look like their own images.” - Cheri K. Erdman

24. “Men were created before women. ... But that doesn't prove their superiority – rather, it proves ours, for they were born out of the lifeless earth in order that we could be born out of living flesh. And what's so important about this priority in creation, anyway? When we are building, we lay foundations on the ground first, things of no intrinsic merit or beauty, before subsequently raising up sumptuous buildings and ornate palaces. Lowly seeds are nourished in the earth, and then later the ravishing blooms appear; lovely roses blossom forth and scented narcissi.” - Moderata Fonte

25. “Telling yourself you like the way you look is easy. Believing it is an entirely different kettle of whales.” - Andrew Biss

26. “Sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart's desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.” - Naomi Wolf

27. “A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights. It's true what they say about women: Women are insatiable. We are greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we would ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands would begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, childcare, etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want, in bed and in the world.” - Naomi Wolf

28. “originality and a feeling of one's own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

29. “The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty.” - Naomi Wolf

30. “You are not what others think you are. You are what God knows you are.” - Shannon Alder

31. “Why should her lover, just because he is male, be in a position to judge her against other women? Why must she need to know her position and hate needing to, and hate knowing? Why should his reply have such exaggerated power? And it does. He does not know that what he says will affect the way she feels when they next make love. She is angry for a number of good reasons that may have nothing to do with this particular man's intentions. The exchange reminds her that, in spite of a whole fabric of carefully woven equalities, they are not equal in this way that is so crucial that its snagged thread unravels the rest.” - Naomi Wolf

32. “For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. Nothing comparable has ever happened in the history of our species; it dislodges Freud. Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank females torsos in women's magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.” - Naomi Wolf

33. “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

34. “If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After awhile you'll see your rivals scrambling for second place.” - Criss Jami

35. “Beliefs that are good promote your potential and enhance your unique special qualities.” - Deborah Day

36. “Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.” - Bernard Branson

37. “Self-pity is the most destructive of all narcotics.” - Sebastian Horsley

38. “For there are two kinds of forgiveness in the world: the one you practice because everything really is all right, and what went before is mended. The other kind of forgiveness you practice because someone needs desperately to be forgiven, or because you need just as badly to forgive them, for a heart can grab hold of old wounds and go sour as milk over them.” - Catherynne M. Valente

39. “It is not important for life to meet your great expectations. What is important is that you hold high expectations of yourself and meet them greatly.” - Dr Roopleen

40. “There is nothing in this world that you cannot do. Every goal is achievable. You just need to focus on your objectives, be persistent in your efforts and work hard to make it happen. There can be no hurdle uncrossable, no obstacle invincible and no stumbling block insurmountable.” - Dr Roopleen

41. “I remembered learning from my favorite professor at Belmont to “surround yourself with people who are better than you,” and I was now living that mantra.” - Kimberly Novosel

42. “I dont care who you are I know who I am” - Sandra Cameroun

43. “Try not to be in a hurry to get older because youth happens once in your life. Thereafter, old age stays with you forever.” - Chris Jirika

44. “There's no alternative to being yourself. Accept it, honour it, value it - and get on with it.” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

45. “You’ve got to be sure of yourself beforeYou can ever win a prize.” - Napoleon Hill

46. “As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man’s demand for your help. To demand it is to claim that your life is his property – and loathsome as such claim might be, there’s something still more loathsome: your agreement. Do you ask if it’s ever proper to help another man? No- if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes- if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value, only man’s fight against suffering is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim – is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values. A man who has no virtues is a hater of existence who acts on the premise of death; to help him is to sanction his evil and to support his career of destruction. Be it only a penny you will miss or a kindly smile he has not earned, a tribute to a zero is treason to life and to all those who struggle to maintain it. It is of such pennies and smiles that the desolation of your world was made.” - Ayn Rand

47. “Every woman that finally figured out her worth, has picked up her suitcases of pride and boarded a flight to freedom, which landed in the valley of change.” - Shannon L. Alder

48. “When you encounter obstacles, don’t turn your back on them. Face them, confront them and your will see them dissolving in front of your eyes.” - Roopleen

49. “If you talked to your friends the way you talk to your body, you’d have no friends left at all.” - Marcia Hutchinson