“Too much self-esteem, thought Simon: the real curse of our age.”

“You can no more have too much self-esteem than you can have too much health.”

“He sneered. "I don't fancy your type.""Why, too sober? Too much self-esteem?”

“Too much of anything could destroy you, Simon thought. Too much darkness could kill, but too much light could blind.”

“Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to feel better about themselves, and in the late 1980s led the California legislature to form a Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Yet Baumeister has shown that the theory could not be more spectacularly, hilariously, achingly wrong. Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned.”

“Too much thought is bad for the soul, for art, and for crime. It is also a sign of middle age.”