Sylvia Plath Quotes

Self worth cannot be verfied by others

Let others determine your worth and you're already lost, because no one wants people worth more than themselves.

You can be loved by your family, your mate, and your friends yet not love yourself. You can be admired by your associates yet regard yourself as worthless. You can project an image of assurance and poise that fools almost everyone yet secretly tremble with a sense of inadequacy. You can fulfill the expectations of others yet fail your own. You can win every honor yet feel that you have accomplished nothing. What shall it profit a person to gain the esteem of the whole world yet lose his or her own?

I kept wanting to push my image as validity; I wanted to see my portrait on a wall and know it was okay.

I see myself as what I'm worth.

The only thing that matters in life is your own opinion about yourself, nobody can destroy your dignity then, because it is not dependent on anybody's opinion.

A man spends his whole life trying to prove his worth to others. A woman spends her life trying to prove her worth to herself.

Thus her whole identity hangs in the balance of her love life. She is allowed to love herself only if a man finds her worthy of love.

Real freedom isn't subject to how others estimate our value; it is in realizing that none are free who find their sense of worth wondering how others measure their lives.

Pride works _from within_; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.

TRUTH: When a child believes he must win to be worthy, when young adults define themselves by what they do and not who they are, it is a kind of slavery a slave master would envy.

I think I am worthwhile just because I have optical nerves and can try to put down what they perceive. What a fool!

Your value should not be determined by how somebody else has treated you.

Scarcity of self value cannot be remedied by money, recognition, affection, attention or influence.

Intellectually, I know I am worthy, however arbitrary a thing worthiness is, and have always been worthy.

Self respect beats social approval, every time.

The main thing you can change is how you perceive yourself. Stop looking in the mirror and realize that youre living for yourself, not other people.

Self worth sets the standard that life meets.

Again--nothing you do or think or wish or make is necessary to establish your worth.

I think a lot of young teenagers try to get esteem from accolades from other people, or boys, and what you learn as you get older is that you have to create that within yourself.

If somebody rejects you or your choices, you are still real, and you are still worth every bit as much as you would be if you had not been rejected.

When you undervalue who you are, the world will undervalue what you do and vice versa.

If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us… We play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

What we must decide is how we are valuable rather than how valuable we are.

You don't need other people to affirm that you're a valuable person.