Pankaj Mishra Quotes

I'm not the sort of person who if everyone thinks you're fabulous you thrive on it.

It gets dangerous when you start allowing people to validate your work.

If you walk into a room and one hundred people say, 'You are a lovely, beautiful person', who isn't going to be affected by that? But you have to tell yourself not to value that. You have to tell yourself - or at least I do - to not become accustomed to hearing applause in any way, because I think that's dangerous.

Maybe to become famous is to reassure yourself that whatever you're lacking inside, you've fulfilled that.

If you're confident in what you do, the compliment doesn't matter.

Don't accept the applause of men, and you won't be destroyed by their criticism.

I do have at home the most ridiculous number of awards for what I have done, which is nice in terms of being patted on the back, yet it does cure you of caring about what other people say about you. Ultimately, you must have your own standard of what is good enough.

The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another's keeping .

As much as the next person, I want to be approved of, but I'm not greedy for that stuff.

I don't want anyone to ever say that I don't belong where I am.

The proud depend upon the world to tell them whether they have value or not. Their self-esteem is determined by where they are judged to be on the ladders of worldly success. They feel worthwhile as individuals if the numbers beneath them in achievement, talent, beauty, or intellect are large enough.

I don't have a strong sense of self-worth unless I'm doing something.

I think that the majority of messages are validating messages to confirm the survival of conscious. And many times that validation message is negative or sad.

I find it amusing on one level, poignant on another, when people try to get recognition from an outside source. It's sad.

We think of ourselves as our titles or our jobs or our position in a family. We depend on being praised by others. But something happens when that praise is undermined.

I was so adamant about proving myself for so long and I've gotten to the point where I don't have to do that as much.

It's cool to have critical success because it's always nice for your peers to say, 'Good job.' But who cares about them?

I've always been looking for other people's approval.

Most successes are unhappy. That's why they are successes - they have to reassure themselves about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice.

Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self-esteem. If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge.

I have to prove myself to everybody.

Success isn't measured by the amount of people that watch you unless you allow it to be.

Awards bolster your confidence in wonderful ways. But they aren't the world.

When I was a younger actor, I was pretty much solely motivated by validation. I just wanted to be told I was good and handsome and a part of the gang. It was pretty simple animal-social stuff. I don't care as much about those things anymore.

I'm tired of proving myself.