“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”
― James Baldwin, Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays

“If you had a person in your life treating you the way you treat yourself, you would have gotten rid of them a long time ago...”
― Cheri Huber, There Is Nothing Wrong with You: Going Beyond Self-Hate

“Self-love is a good thing but self-awareness is more important. You need to once in a while go ‘Uh, I’m kind of an asshole.”
― Louis C.K.

“This thing about looking for someone less different... It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn't so bad in the first place.”
― Nick Hornby, About a Boy

“I've gone through stages where I hate my body so much that I won't even wear shorts and a bra in my house because if I pass a mirror, that's the end of my day.”
― Fiona Apple

“Do you know that feeling? When everything you do seems like a struggle. Where you dont wanna leave the house because you know everyone is judging you. Where you cant even ask for directions in fear that they critise you. Where everyone always seems to be picking out your flaws. That feeling where you feel so damn sick for no reason.
Do you know that feeling where you look in the mirror and completly hate what you see. When you grab handfuls and handfuls of fat and just want to cut it all off. That feeling when you see other beautiful girls and just wish you looked like them. When you compare yourself to everyone you meet. When you realise why no one ever showed intrest in you. That feeling where you become so self conscious you dont even turn up at school. That feeling when you feel so disappointed in who you are and everything you have become. That feeling when every bite makes you wanna be sick. When hunger is more satifying that food. The feeling of failure when you eat a meal.
Do you know that feeling when you cant run as far as your class. Fear knowing that everyone thinks of you as the"Unfit FAT BITCH" That feeling when you just wanna let it all out but you dont wanna look weak. The fear you have in class when you dont understand something but your too afraid to ask for help. The feeling of being to ashamed to stand up for yourself.
Do you know the feeling when your deepest fear becomes a reality. Fear that you will NEVER be good enough. When you feel as if you deserve all the pain you give yourself. When you finally understand why everyone hates you. FINALLY realising the harsh truth. Understanding that every cut, every burn, every bruise you have even given yourself, you deserved. In fact you deserved worse. That feeling when you believe you deserve constant and brutal pain.
Do you know what it feels like to just want to give up. When you just want all the pain to end but you want it to continue? Or am i just insane”
― Anonymous.

“Perhaps the most liberating moment in my life was when I realized that my self-loathing was not a product of my inadequacy but, rather, a product of my thoughts.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Love Mindset: An Unconventional Guide to Healing and Happiness

“If you're capable of despising your own behavior, you might just love yourself.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“She hated her job the same way I hated my jobs because she knew she was worth more, but she also hated herself so there wasn't much point in trying to do better.”
― Tawni O'Dell, Back Roads

“I was so self-critical. I still am; but it's not as bad anymore.”
― Fiona Apple

“Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impatsi of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can't create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.”
― Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror

“I tried to be someone else, but nothing seemed to change. I know now, this is who I really am inside. I've finally found myself, fighting for a chance.
I know now, this is who I really am.”
― Jared Leto

“[...] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.”
― Nick Hornby, About a Boy

“The average person’s self-esteem is so low that they are way less frequently surprised that they love someone than they are surprised that someone loves them.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Is it normal for one person to have this many enemies? I’m the problem, aren’t I?How did it get so late already?I understand why they all hate me.I might hate me too.”
― Holly Jackson, As Good As Dead

“That is because no one could ever hate me as much as I hate myself, okay? So any mean thing someone's gonna think of to say about me, I've already said to me, about me, probably within the last half hour.”
― Lena Dunham

“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza’s The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia. 281

281 - This had been one of Hal’s deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he’d come up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room. That we’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he’s never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“I am stupid, am I not? What more can I want? If you ask them who is brave--who is true--who is just--who is it they would trust with their lives?--they would say, Tuan Jim. And yet they can never know the real, real truth....”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream,--and there was no answer one could make her--there seemed to be no forgiveness for such a transgression.
And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“This is glorious!' I cried, and then i looked at the sinner by my side. He sat with his head sunk on his breast and said 'Yes', without raising his eyes, as if afraid to see writ large on the clear sky of the offing the reproach of his romantic conscience.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“All representatives of the ideology of power, which is based on a false conception of the self, fear people who are inner-directed and have contempt for them because it is a fear that cannot be acknowledged. It makes no difference if one is on the right or left politically. What we are faced with on all sides is an obsession with power, rather than an openness to reality with all its rich and vital possibilities.”
― Arno Gruen, The Insanity of Normality: Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness

“As long as we measure a person's psychological health by the degree to which he or she accepts social conventions, we will fail to see that under certain circumstances these conventions demand a submissive acceptance of of errors and lies.”
― Arno Gruen, The Betrayal of the Self

“The Father- blessed be His Name world without end- showed me His Son in the Light that never sets, and thus made me so forcefully perceive my sin - I had disdained God - that for long years I wept, prostrate in despair over my wickedness. I recognised my behaviour in departing from God in all its abomination, and felt bitter shame. I become abhorrent to myself, and my self-contempt found a fellow-traveller - self-hatred. I cannot say that I hated my father or my mother, my family or my friends. It was enough for me to detest myself, I somehow did not even think about anyone else. My longing for God caused me intolerable pain - such pain that I lost all awareness of the material world, as I sojourned alone with Him. I do not know whether the Lord altogether forgave me my sin but I could not forgive myself for what I had done. Through my personal tragedy I lived the tragedy of our forefather Adam - the heritage handed down from generation to generation of the inhabitants of the earth. Through this channel prayer came to me for all the world.”
― Sophrony Sakharov, On Prayer

“Love how you hate yourself sometimes, because at least there's still something to hate.”
― Neil Hilborn

“Do you think you are good, Cassandra?"

"I don't think. I know. I'm not good. I can do good things. But I'm not good.”
― James Tynion IV, Batman: Detective Comics, Vol. 7: Batmen Eternal

“When a man can’t accept rejection, there’s no such thing as letting him down easy. So just accept the fact that he might call you a mean, stuck up B! among other things depending on how bruised his ego is over you politely saying you’re not interested. It’s not you- it’s him.”
― Niedria Kenny, Order in the Courtroom: The Tale of a Texas Poker Player

“I was so convinced that I couldn't be loved that loving me must have been difficult.”
― Carmen Pellegrino, Cade la terra

“The universe has never seen a living being who loathed being alive as much as my father. His life was broken in seeking to prove how humanity could be controlled, and his death was a sacrifice to prove that the species was ultimately wretched.”
― Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Void Stalker

“To understand the ties that attach us to each other, we only have a very limited number of models: so me to me? We approve or disapprove of ourselves, we love or hate ourselves, we do not have any more power over ourselves than over others, it is the same struggle that confronts us, victors or vanquished, with our external enemies and our inner contradictions.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, Orlanda