Quotes About Self Affirmation

“If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity's modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at the microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions.”

— James K.A. Smith

“I can worship Nature, and that fulfills my need for miracles and beauty. Art gives a spiritual depth to existence
I can find worlds bigger and deeper than my own in music, paintings, and books. And from my friends and family I receive the highest benediction, emotional contact, and personal affirmation. I can bow before the works of Man, from buildings to babies, and that fulfills my need for wonder. I can believe in the sanctity of Life, and that becomes the Revealed Word, to live my life as I believe it should be, not as I'm told to by self-appointed guides.”

— Neil Peart

“Abstractions do us much harm by impelling us to the quest of the absolute in all things. Joy does not exist, but there are joys: and these joys may not be folly felt unless they are detached from neutral or even painful conditions. The idea of continuity is almost self-negating. Nature makes no leaps; but life makes only bounds. It is measured by our heartbeats & these may be counted. That there should be, amid the number of deep pulsations that scan the line of our existence, some grievous ones, does not permit the affirmation that life is therefore evil. Moreover, neither a continuous joy would be perceived by consciousness.”

— Rémy De Gourmont

“Negative self-talk and negative affirmation can keep you anchored in old thought patterns and identities.”

— Bryant McGill

“The neurotic is aware of the danger of a situation in which his unrealistic self-affirmation is broken down and no realistic self-affirmation takes its place.”

— Paul Tillich

“Self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn't matter; it may be worthwhile or it may be worthless. No wine is so intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling. When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son.”

— W. Somerset Maugham

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.”

— Bell Hooks

“Individuals who speak languages other than English, who speak patois as well as standard English, find it a necessary aspect of self-affirmation not to feel compelled to chose one voice over another, not to claim one as more authentic but rather to construct social realities that celebrate, acknowledge and affirm differences, variety.”

— Bell Hooks

“The Dalai Lama has said: "My religion is kindness." If we all adopted such a stance and embodied it in thought and action, inner and outer peace would be immediate, for in reality they are never not present, only obscured, waiting to be discovered. This is the work and the power of lovingkindness, the embrace that allows no separation between self, others, and events-the affirmation and honoring of a core goodness in others and in oneself.”

— Sharon Salzberg

“Beauty is not skin-deep; it can be a means of self-affirmation, a true indicator of personality and confidence.”

— Aimee Mullins

“The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen.”

— Ellen Key

“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.”

— Henri J.M. Nouwen

“In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?”

— Gao Xingjian

“If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event - and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“Their eyes met for a moment. And the glance that flickered between them had been a wordless message of understanding, the affirmation of a sympathetic secret alliance from which everyone else was excluded by natural law - the close mysterious blood-bond between two mutants, of which she had not yet heard. But, in some indescribable fashion, it had seemed, even then, that, obscurely, everything was already known and had been accepted, accepted finally and absolutely, in the depths of her unconscious self.”

— Anna Kavan

“Communism ... is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as this solution.”

— Peter Singer

“It's a career that's enticing because you go on stage, for example, and people clap. You get that affirmation, but you can't go into acting for that because it's really your own self-belief that's going to get you through.”

— Miranda Otto

“He had begun the diary less as a record of his life (for whom and why? What life?) than as a regular and self-indulgent exploration, a means of makings sense of the past years, part catharsis, part comforting affirmation.”

— P.D. James

“That gospel message should both humble and lift the believer up at the same time. It teaches us that we are indeed self-centered sinners. It perforates our illusions about our goodness and superiority. But the gospel also fills us with more love and affirmation than we could ever imagine. It means we don't need to earn our self-worth through incessant service and work. It means also that we don't mind so much when we are deprived of some comfort, compliment, or reward. We don't have to keep records and accounts anymore. We can freely give and freely receive.”

— Timothy Keller

“If you think about the world of a preschooler, they are surrounded by stuff they don't understand-things that are novel. So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it's a search for understanding and predictability," says Anderson. "For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, the not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self-worth. And Blue's Clues doubles that feeling, because they also feel like they are participating in something. They feel like they are helping Steve.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

“WHAT A TIRING WAY TO LIVE, WHEN YOUR SELF-WORTH IS CONSTANTLY RELYING ON THE AFFIRMATION AND APPROVAL OF OTHERS.”

— Darlene Zschech

“Islam united all heresies persecuted in Byzantine Empire and synthesised them well into a conseffion that later became a symbol of Arab self-affirmation.”

— Lev Gumilev

“The artist is always a servant, and is perpetually trying to pay for the gift that has been given to him as if by miracle. Modern man, however, does not want to make any sacrifice, even though true affirmation of self can only be expressed in sacrifice.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

“Self-affirmation cannot be found in love; it is a prior condition of genuine love.”

— Jo Coudert

“What has to be given up is not the I, but that drive for self-affirmation which impels man to flee from the unreliable, unsolid, unlasting, unpredictable, dangerous world of relation into the having of things.”

— Martin Buber

“A glad welcome to this affirmation by a group of psychologists that the self does not stop at the skin nor even with the circle of human relationships but is interwoven with the lives of trees and animals and soil; that caring for the deepest needs of persons and caring for our threatened planet are not in conflict.”

— Mary Catherine Bateson

“It belongs to the very substance of nonviolence never to destroy or damage another person's feeling of self worth, even an opponent's. We all need, constantly, an advance of trust and affirmation.”

— Bernhard Haring

“A win gives one a feeling of self-affirmation, and success - a feeling of self-expression, but only a sensible harmonization between these urges can bring really great achievements in chess.”

— Oleg Romanishin

“When you learn to embrace your self with a sense of appreciation and affection, you begin to glimpse the goodness and light that is in you and gradually you will realize that you are worthy of respect from yourself. When you recognize your limits, but still embrace your life with affection and graciousness, the sense of inner dignity begins to grow. You become freer and less dependent on the affirmation of outer voices and less troubled by the negativity of others.”

— John O'Donohue

“Power is required for communication. To stand before an indifferent or hostile group and have one's say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths that go deep and hurt these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression ... My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one's deepest thoughts to another.”

— Rollo May

“We must stand up and say, "I'm black and I'm beautiful," and this self-affirmation is the black man's need, made compelling by the white man's crimes against him.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The essence of spirituality does not consist in a specialised or narrow interest in some imagined part of life, but in a certain enlightened attitude to all the various situations which obtain in life. It covers and includes the whole of life. All the material things of this world can be made subservient to the divine game, and when they are thus subordained they become auxiliary to the self-affirmation of the spirit.”

— Meher Baba

“If the denial of death is self-hatred, as it is to deny our freedom and live in fear of death (which is to say, to live in a form of bondage), then the acceptance and affirmation of death is indeed a form of self-love. But I'd want to make a distinction between a form of self-love which is essential to what it means to be human, and a narcissism of self-regard, like Rousseau's distinction between amour de soi and amour propre, self-love and pride.”

— Simon Critchley

“Absolute faith is not the place of self-affirmation, but the place of self-negation. Life of faith is not limited to our spiritual life. What is important is how our spiritual sensitivity is applied to our relative environment.”

— Sun Myung Moon

“Having expressed the rage against the laws and conditions that oppressed them - maybe even excess anger in the beginning was directed at men they came in contact with, because it had been pent up too long - women now come from a new position of easier, more comfortable self-affirmation and empowerment. Women are given to tolerance and are more able to love. I hope it happens also to men.”

— Betty Friedan

“In a man like Friedrich von Schlegel the courage to be as an individual self produced complete neglect of participation, but it also produced, in reaction to the emptiness of this self-affirmation, the desire to return to a collective. Schlegel, and with him many extreme individualists in the last hundred years, became Roman Catholics. The courage to be as oneself broke down, and one turned to an institutional embodiment of the courage to be as a part.”

— Paul Tillich

“Mystical identification transcends the aristocratic virtue of courageous self-sacrifice. It is self- surrender in a higher, more complete, and more complete and more radical form. It is the perfect form of self-affirmation.”

— Paul Tillich

“Individualism is the self-affirmation of the individual self as individual self without regard to its participation in its world. As such it is the opposite of collectivism, the self affirmation of the self as part of a larger whole without regard to its character as an individual self.”

— Paul Tillich

“The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self-affirmation of the individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation of the universe .”

— Paul Tillich

“What has here happened is that the instinct of cruelty, which has turned inwards, has become self-torture, and all man's animal instincts have been reinterpreted as guilt towards God. Every Nay man utters to his nature, to his real being, he flings out as a Yea, an affirmation of reality applied to God's sanctity”

— Georg Brandes

“Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncracy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination.”

— Carl Jung

“The internationalization of art becomes a factor contributing to the estrangement of art from the artist. The sum of works of all times and places stands against him as an entity with objectives and values of its own. In turn, since becoming aware of the organized body of artworks as the obstacle to his own aesthetic self-affirmation, the artist is pushed toward anti-intellectualism and willful dismissal of the art of the past.”

— Harold Rosenberg

“Real greatness is often hidden, humble, simple, and unobtrusive. It is not easy to trust ourselves and our actions without public affirmation. We must have strong self-confidence combined with deep humility.”

— Henri Nouwen

“Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death. And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die. To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

“It's no accident that most of the great black spokespersons and leaders understood the centrality of self-affirmation, self-respect and self-love.”

— Cornel West

“A Course In Miracles is a constant affirmation that you are created by an unconditional thought of love that appears to have lost itself in a world of fear. Freedom, joy and peace of mind are yours again, when you remember and re-connect to your unconditional self.”

— Robert Holden