Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

People have been so busy relating to how I look, it's a miracle I didn't become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm.

Everything you think about yourself, everything you believe about yourself, is because you learned it.

To me the ego is the habitual and compulsive thought processes that go through everybody's mind continuously. External things like possessions or memories or failures or successes or achievements. Your personal history.

Body image has a lot to do with where you're coming from personally.

I have to figure out why I worked at a job I hated for years. I have to find out why I can’t see what everyone else sees in me. I don’t feel beautiful. When I look in the mirror, I never saw beautiful. For this to happen to someone like me, it’s devastating, Jonas. I don’t want you to think it’s vanity, it isn’t. I can’t see me and I need to be able to do that. I need to find out what I’m like and what I want. I have to be comfortable in my own skin before I can be in a relationship the way you want.

The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.

How you perceive yourself is how others will see you.

Yet each of us also carries another portrait with us, a picture far more important than any in our wallet. Psychologists have a name for it. They call that mental picture of ourselves, our self-image. ... there's always the person whose self-image is bent all out of shape, like a photo carried too long in a wallet.The good news of the tremendous worth we have in God's eyes can light up our inner self-portrait.

It is difficult to divest one's self of vanity; because impossible to divest one's self of self-love.

What is the image you have of yourself?

The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself.

If I am not pleased with myself, but should wish to be other than I am, why should I think highly of the influences which have made me what I am?

Show me a sensible person who likes himself or herself! I know myself too well to like what I see. I know but too well that I'm not what I'd like to be.

Your capability is constant, but how much of it you use depends upon the identity you have for yourself.

We have so many ideas and beliefs about ourselves. We told ourselves story about what we want and who we are, smart or kind. Often these are the unexamined and limited ideas of others that we have internalized and then gone on to life out.

The picture you have of yourself, your self-esteem, will have a profound effect on the way you see the world and the way your world sees you.

We change our opinions of ourselves so often. What the outside world thinks is only a small part of our image.

That's the biggest thing to separate - your body from your self worth.

The treatment you permit reveals the portrait you have of yourself.

It is bad enough to be condemned to drag around this image in which nature has imprisoned me. Why should I consent to the perpetuation of the image of this image?

I'm always interested in how people, myself included, have ideas of themselves, of how they thought they would be, or of how they want to be seen. And the older you get, the world keeps telling you different things about yourself. And how people either adjust to those things and let go of adolescent notions. Or they dig in deeper.

When I was younger, my father told me not to pigeonhole the way that I perceive myself.

You think you know who you are, and then other people have these other ideas.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.

The perception of identity is so intimately bound up with the perception of the human form.