External Perception Quotes

An Olympic medal won't define my whole life, although it might look like it to onlookers. When I look back, I should have been able to get an Olympic medal.

In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.

It's a very, very exciting time, but you can't help thinking or not quite knowing how it's seen from the outside. You're constantly in a state of terror or regret, not quite knowing how things are going to pan out, or whether you've made the right decisions. But, maybe that's just what it's like. Maybe that's just the life of it.

It is better to look good than to feel good.

To be a king and wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it.

When you possess light within, you see it externally.

I'm this goofball. I look at myself in the mirror, and the person that I know doesn't match up to what I think people love to perceive me as.

Going for the Rhodes, it really put a label on me that was hard to shake, and frankly I don't think that I did shake it.

One eye looks within, the other eye looks without.

When I hear myself, I don't know how I sound.

Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.

A [wo]man who is unconscious of [her/]himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbour.

Credibility is someone else's idea of what I should be doing.

If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.

The outside world thinks that this country consists of a man and a desert.

A wise man poor Is like a sacred book that ’s never read,— To himself he lives, and to all else seems dead. This age thinks better of a gilded fool Than of a threadbare saint in wisdom’s school.

We are not what other people say we are. We are who we know ourselves to be, and we are what we love. That's okay.

Your reputation is what you're perceived to be, Your character is what you really are

Outward appearances mean everything.

However much we guard against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us.

My experience is that I find myself having to constantly define myself to others, day-in, day-out. The quote that's helped me the most through that is from Toni Morrison's "Beloved" where she says, "Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined" - so I find myself defining myself for other people lest I be defined by others and stuck into some box where I don't particularly belong.

And the best way to know who we are is often to find out how others see us.

You forget, living outside of a country, that the actions of the government are not the actions of the people.

I want to be really special, I want to be really good. It's not enough to be famous for me. Famous is empty so quickly, it's not what people think it is. It's wonderful, but if you're famous and you feel that you're an artist inside and everyone thinks you're just a celebrity, it's really painful.

...and yet I am what they think I am.