You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it.

If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.

Your self-reliance, self-appraisal and self- perception depends on how successful you are at knowing who God has created you to become

Too often fear is fiction madly running amuck, all the while madly tracking ‘muck’ across the floor of fact.

There are times in life that we ascribe qualities or traits to other people that are inaccurate or fail to recognize other aspects of their being because we are emotionally invested in that person fulfilling a specific role in our life. When we claim that the other person changed it is not so much that they altered their core composition, but we now must admit to ourselves that our original perception of them was imprecise.

People are crying up the rich and variegated plumage of the peacock, and he is himself blushing at the sight of his ugly feet.

We must clean the lens of our hearts to see the state of our souls. However, too often the former is too dirty to even know that the latter exists.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

Forgiveness has nothing to do with absolving a criminal of his crime. It has everything to do with relieving oneself of the burden of being a victim--letting go of the pain and transforming oneself from victim to survivor.

Don't spend your life believing a story about yourself that you didn't write that's been fed to you - that simply you've accepted, embedded and added to. Let the story go and there beneath is the real you...and your unique gifts, heart and path that await you.

I Don’t Suffer From A Complex But The Complex Suffers From Me.

Butterflies can't see their wings. They can't see how truly beautiful they are, but everyone else can. People are like that as well.

When you hear men talking," said Cornelia, "all they ever do is speak ill of women. ... And I don't quite know how they managed to make this law in their favour, or who exactly it was who gave them a greater license to sin than is allowed to us; and if the fault is common to both sexes (as they can hardly deny), why should the blame not be as well? What makes them think they can boast of the same thing that in women brings only shame?

There is that gnawing feeling that we are far more than what we believe ourselves to be. Maybe it’s time to believe the gnawing.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

She had been so vulnerable, and Norah wanted only to protect her. But that vulnerability was tied to a massive mistake, a perception of herself too damaged to love. If Norah got anything from this book, it's that we're all damaged. The tragedy is letting it define you.

Who you are is too vast to be captured by the reflection of a mirror, classified by the state of your attitude, or categorized by the opinions of others. Therefore, if any of these are defining you, you have yet to be defined.

I take my cues from the world around me and carefully paint a self-portrait that the world can’t help but accept. However, I would be much wiser to put down all such artistic notions and hold up the portrait of me painted by God simply because that is a picture at which the world can’t help but marvel.

It has nothing to do with who I am as compared to everyone else. It has everything to do with who I am in companionship with God.

A beautiful person is not defined by a hair style, a pair of shoes, it’s not the logos on the T-shirt, the sport’s team on a hat, the designer’s name on a hand bag, or even how you smell.Instead, beauty lies in who you are when no one is watching, the person you are when there’s nothing to hide behind. No amount of concealer can cover up a cantankerous heart, but all the make-up in the world can’t add a single lumen to the brightness of a beautiful soul.

Secularity is a way of being dependent on the responses of our milieu. The secular or false self is the self which is fabricated, as Thomas Merton says, by social compulsions. 'Compulsive' is indeed the best adjective for the false self. It points to the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated or despised. Whether I am a pianist, a businessman or a minister, what matters is how I am perceived by my world. If being busy is a good thing, then I must be busy. If having money is a sign of real freedom, then I must claim my money. If knowing many people proves my importance, I will have to make the necessary contacts. The compulsion manifests itself in the lurking fear of failure and the steady urge to prevent this by gathering more of the same - more work, more money, more friends.

The image that concerns most people is the reflection they see in other people's minds.

Who people think they are and what people think they want is not really who they are or what they want.

As you heal, you see yourself more realistically. You accept that you are a person with strengths and weaknesses. You make the changes you can in your life and let go of the things that aren’t in your power to change. You learn that every part of you is valuable. And you realize that all of your thoughts and feelings are important, even when they’re painful or difficult.

If we cant laugh at ourselves, do we have the right to laugh at others?

Greatness demands that I understand that I am not nearly as big as I thought myself to be, but that I am capable of becoming far bigger than I ever imagined myself to be.

What man ain't the honestest cove in his own eyes?" Grote's round face is a bronze moon in the dark. "'Tain't good intentions what paves the road to hell: it's self-justifyin's.

But I never looked like that!’ - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.

I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.

Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. Life would undergo a change of appearance because we ourselves had undergone a change of attitude.

...all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust

He wasn't so elderly after all, I saw: probably just a few years older than I. And yet I was never able (and am still not) to think of myself as old. I talked as if I knew I was; I bemoaned my age. But it was only for comedy, or to make other people feel young.

Most people overestimate others' talents and underestimate their own.

There's more to clothing than just adornment. It does more than merely change how the world perceives us. It changes how we perceive ourselves.

Anita Johnston, Ph.D., author of Eating in the Light of the Moon, taught me to look in the mirror with curiosity rather than fear. So I may look at my reflection and think, ‘That’s interesting. I wonder why my body seems bigger today than it did yesterday. Maybe it’s water weight. Maybe it’s my outfit. Or maybe my eyes are just playing tricks on me.’ I know it’s not possible for me to gain a noticeable amount of weight overnight, so I will go no further than that. I move on with my day without skipping a beat—and definitely without missing a meal.

We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us.