Self Doubt Quotes

“Insecurity is the lack of trust in your abilities and worth. When you enter into a secured state of consciousness, everything that helped boost your confidence will return.”
― Itohan Eghide, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“Is your life story the truth? Yes, the chronological events are true. Is it the whole truth? No, you see and judge it through your conditioned eyes and mind - not of all involved - nor do you see the entire overview. Is it nothing but the truth? No, you select, share, delete, distort, subtract, assume and add what you want, need and choose to.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“Because of self-doubt, the fear of failure, or laziness, most people usually bite off way less than they can chew.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“How do you surrender when every cell of your being is screaming that your life is not working and that you need to do something to make it work? How do you surrender in that moment when jealousies, envy, doubt, rage, resentment all rise up inside you? You accept that you are resisting letting go; you accept that perhaps you are not yet ready to take your hands off the steering wheel; you accept this with kindness to who you are in the moment, being gentle and tender instead of beating yourself over the head with the 'Must hurry up, time is of the essence, everyone is passing me by' train of thought.”
― Kelly Martin, When Everyone Shines But You - Saying Goodbye To I'm Not Good Enough

“It is not through fighting the opposition that will win you dignity. It is when you fight the fear in yourself that asks you why you don't feel you have it, regardless if you win or lose.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“You may experience waves of disbelief after each memory you retrieve. Whether as a phase or waves, the disbelief is usually accompanied by massive self-hate and guilt. ‘How can I even think such a thing? I must really be warped,’ you tell yourself.”
― Renee Fredrickson, Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse

“The mental mist of ambiguity and the fog of ambivalence hamper human existence.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A person’s greatest limitations are not genetic, but imposed by self-doubt, insecurities, indecision, and timidity.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“When someone is cruel, harsh, mean, to not take their words personally is one thing, but to hear the silent cry within those words is another. This sort of perspective can not only liberate us from crippling self-doubt in the face of criticism, it can also liberate us from automatically becoming blind participants in the interaction patterns that the cruel person has become accustomed to—a favour we do for the other person as much as for ourselves.”
― Vironika Tugaleva

“A little self-doubt is a good thing," said Jia, "but not excessive doubt. Sometimes we live up to the stories others tell about us.”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“Why is hard to believe than to doubt?”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“Indecision and fear can cripple any chances of succeeding and lead to maelstroms of regret that fuel our most fantastic nightmares.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Something deep inside of me speaks with the voice of the psycho: For who could ever love a beast?”
― Zoe Cruz, Beastia

“Never let fear hold you captive.
Never let self-doubt hold you captive.
Never let frustration hold you captive.”
― Roy Bennett

“Because that saying about sticks and stones is a pack of lies. Unkind words hurt more than anything else. You end up carrying them around in your head, wondering if they’re true. Bruises fade, but self-doubt follows you forever.”
― Kate Lattey, Triple Bar

“Frank Halford was a master at the school and remembers Adams as “very tall even then, and popular. He wrote an end-of-term play when Doctor Who had just started on television. He called it ‘Doctor Which.’ ” Many years later, Adams did write scripts for Doctor Who. He describes Halford as an inspirational teacher who is still a support. “He once gave me ten out of ten for a story, which was the only time he did throughout his long school career. And even now, when I have a dark night of the soul as a writer and think that I can’t do this anymore, the thing that I reach for is not the fact that I have had best-sellers or huge advances. It is the fact that Frank Halford once gave me ten out of ten, and at some fundamental level I must be able to do it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“A youth is susceptible to the influence of idealist notions. As a person ages, they notice a gap between their expectations and reality and they grow more pessimistic about the world and their ability to live up to the lofty notions that inspired a younger self.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“He recalls a lot of family worry about what he was going to do, and while he still sent in the occasional sketch to radio shows, he acknowledges that his confidence was extremely low. Despite his subsequent success and wealth, this propensity for a lack of confidence has continued.

“I have terrible periods of lack of confidence,” he explains. “I just don’t believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view. I briefly did therapy, but after a while I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather—you just have to get on with it.”

So has that approach helped him? “Not necessarily,” he shrugs.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“The best writers I've read possess oodles of self-doubt, yet claw their way up with each work and remain humble. Boastful ones, not so much.”
― Don Roff

“I write every day whether somebody pays me or not. I write every day whether or not self-doubt is kicking my ass. It's what writers must do.”
― Don Roff

“Yolanda Gampel utilizes an expanded concept of the "uncanny" to outline the results of violence:

Those who experience such traumas are faced with an unbelievable and unreal reality that is incompatible with anything they knew previously. As a result, they can no longer fully believe what they see with their own eyes; they have difficulty distinguishing between the unreal reality they have survived and the fears that spring from their own imagination.”
― Nicole Waller, Contradictory Violence: Revolution and Subversion in the Caribbean

“Intellectually he understood perfectly what the problem was: guilt and doubt, the waste products of innocence and faith, inhibited him and filled him with self-loathing even at his own weakness in trying to be free of them.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Star Fraction

“Self-doubt and Depression are the real killers. The other are just pawns.”
― Deyth Banger

“I'm determined that I won't give up on my dreams for anything. I have evolved in these years. Learned and outgrown a lot many things including the unrealistic expectations of my family,fake relationships,society's criticism,surpassed people who are intimidated by my outspoken nature, Faux friends and especially the people who disappear in dark whenever they think its easier for them to do so. I have grown over stupid and useless conversations. The insecurity and the feeling of self doubt. I have never been less burdened.”
― Parul Wadhwa, The Masquerade

“He intrigued her. Powerful men, in her experience, were usually not so full of doubt. Kuni was consumed by the desire to do good for others, but uncertain what "good" might be and whether he was the right man for the job.
Kuni was the sort of man, Risana realized, who, rather than deceive himself, was so full of self-doubt that he could not longer see himself”
― Ken Liu, The Grace of Kings

“It was one thing to believe in yourself, but quite another to bet.”
― F. D. Lee, The Fairy's Tale

“Powerlessness is such a lure, such a poisonous lure.”
― Carolyn Ives Gilman, Halfway Human

“A person is bound to experience troubling doubts when attempting to forge a viable philosophy for living. When we are young, the world appears as a dream, no desire is unattainable, and no goal is impossible. We do not entertain the notion that the world will blunt our passionate aspirations, we assume that the world will yield to our resolute will. Misfortune, poverty, illness, and death crush a person’s hopes, awakening us to parts of oneself and the world that we previously denied. When fate has spoken harshly we initially feel ruined, life appears as a bleak wasteland. We must then chose to accept a misery ridden existence or rally the courage and fortitude to turn our thoughts from bitterness and regrets, surrender vain notions that we are somehow special and immune from the terrors of a life when reality does not care a wit for our survival.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“In graduate school, early on, I once overheard a classmate talking in her office as I walked by. She didn't know I was there. She was gossiping about me to a group of our classmates & said I was the affirmative-action student...Rationally, I know it was absurd, but hearing how she & maybe others saw me hurt real bad...I stopped joking about being a slacker. I tripled the number of projects I was involved with. I was excellent most of the time. I fell short some of the time. I made sure I got good grades. I made sure my comprehensive exams were solid. I wrote conference proposals & had them accepted. I published. I designed an overly ambitious research project for my dissertation that kind of made me want to die. No matter what I did, I heard that girl, that girl who had accomplished a fraction of a fraction of what I had, telling a group of our peers I was the one who did not deserve to be in our program.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“A person whom writes begins by putting down what they know about loneliness, shame, love, and heartache. In writing fully, they discover many other aspects of themselves that they never suspected including doubts, beliefs, ironies, and farcicalities.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls