Maya Angelou Quotes

The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.

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?

Who you are vs. who you wish you were: Who wins?

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.

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.

I was deeply uncertain of who I was and who I wanted to be. I really thought I wanted to be a much cooler guy than what I was.

I'm searching, as we all are, for ways to feel good about myself. Certainly, looking in the mirror doesn't do it!

When I look at myself, I see a person who strangely lacks what I consider the ingredients of a personality.

I'm still conscious of whether people really accept me, but that insecurity makes me stronger.

I've given up trying to understand what people think about me.

One that does not think to highly of himself is more than he thinks.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

I wonder how I seem to them. They must see someone I don't see. Someone capable and strong. Someone I can't be; someone I can be.

The name, his true name, was weaker and more flawed than he would have liked, and he hated himself for that, but there was also much to admire within it, and the more he thought about it, the more he was able to accept the true nature of his self. He was not the best person in the world, but neither was he the worst.

He had an opinion of himself, I think, that was too high for his own good. Or maybe it was the reverse. Maybe it was a low opinion that he kept trying to erase.

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.

I'm not quite as cool as I would like to be, really.

Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.

A man is always better than he thinks.

I know who I am. When I look in the mirror, I see me.

How you define yourself is a major issue for young people and adults alike.

I like myself a lot more than I used to. I had a very difficult time in my twenties especially. It was hard for me to look in the mirror and find something that I liked about myself.

People aren't interested in seeing themselves as they really are.

I've let a lot of things go, and obviously football is one of them. I think the hardest thing to let go is your self-image. That's what I'm working on now.

People see us as no better than we are.