Haruki Murakami Quotes

There's no room in my life for feeling sorry for myself.

How can you blame others for disrespecting you when you think of yourself as unworthy of respect?

Most people with low self-esteem have earned it.

You can never win when you wear the ugly cloak of self-pity and the sour sound of whining.

If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?

I'm not blaming my mom for my life because I am responsible for me, and nobody can change me or ruin me easier than I can.

Guilt is just as powerful, but its influence is positive, while shame's is destructive. Shame erodes our courage and fuels disengagement.

My mother used to say, If other people have a problem with you, that's their problem. It's not your problem. I still have that philosophy today.

Life's most underrated emotion is self-pity.

I can't feel sorry for myself.

When you learn to say yes to yourself, you will be able to say no to others, with love.

I get self-conscious, but you have to just embrace it and go with it.

Just because you had every right to feel sorry for yourself didn't mean you ever took the opportunity to do so.

"Liberating" is a gay word, so let's phrase it this way: I know everything about me and still manage to be good friends with myself, so nothing anyone says that's truthful about me ever bothers me.

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.

For Black people, we're one of the only groups of people that for some reason to express love of yourself, in some ways, is misconstrued as a dislike for someone else.

There are really only two ways to approach life - as victim or as gallant fighter - and you must decide if you want to act or react, deal your own cards or play with a stacked deck. And if you don't decide which way to play with life, it always plays with you.

It takes years as a woman to unlearn what you have been taught to be sorry for.

Laugh and dare to try to love somebody, starting with yourself. You must love yourself first, of course, and you must protect yourself so that nobody overrides you, overrules you, or steps on you. Just say, 'Just a minute. I'm worth everything, dear.'

All it takes is a simple choice, a simple decision: no matter what happens, I will create no more pain for myself. I will create no more problems.

And yet she could not forgive herself. Even as an adult, she wished only that she could go back and change things: the ungainly things she’d worn, the insecurity she’d felt, all the innocent mistakes she made.

Stop looking out, start looking in. Be your own best friend. Stand up and say, hey, this is mine!

No one starts as a self-hater. But rack up all of your mistakes and take a large enough number of wrong turns in life and soon you stop trying to forgive yourself. Everywhere you look you find shame or failure staring back.

I let myself feel good and sorry for myself, but only for a second. Daddy always said that the most useless of all human emotions was self-pity.

Learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, is important. The reason it's important is that, fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn't just ourselves that we're discovering. We're discovering the universe.