Self-Respect Quotes

1. “Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.”

2. “Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that's real power.”

3. “There are two kinds of pride, both good and bad. 'Good pride' represents our dignity and self-respect. 'Bad pride' is the deadly sin of superiority that reeks of conceit and arrogance.”

4. “Everyone in society should be a role model, not only for their own self-respect, but for respect from others.”

5. “That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.”

6. “Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with with your self-esteem. They're no good at all.”

7. “Self-respect knows no considerations.”

8. “To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”

9. “Our self-respect does not have a price tag.”

10. “Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.”

11. “Perhaps the surest test of an individual's integrity is his refusal to do or say anything that would damage his self-respect.”

12. “The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.”

13. “You will encounter misguided people from time to time. That's part of life. The challenge is to educate them when you can, but always to keep your dignity and self-respect and persevere in your personal growth and development.”

14. “Self-respect, dignity and grace are very important. You may look a certain way or come from a certain background but when you have these three qualities you stand apart from the crowd.”

15. “I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin.”

16. “Self-respect permeates every aspect of your life.”

17. “I never work just to work. It's some combination of laziness and self-respect.”

18. “Children need to get a high-quality education, avoid violence and the criminal-justice system, and gain jobs. But they deserve more. We want them to learn not only reading and math but fairness, caring, self-respect, family commitment, and civic duty.”

19. “No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.”

20. “Real education enhances the dignity of a human being and increases his or her self-respect. If only the real sense of education could be realized by each individual and carried forward in every field of human activity, the world will be so much a better place to live in.”

21. “Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect.”

22. “Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.”

23. “Punishment may make us obey the orders we are given, but at best it will only teach an obedience to authority, not a self-control which enhances our self-respect.”

24. “Self-respect is a commodity worth cleaving to.”

25. “Financial problems cause distress and loss of self-respect.”

26. “The adolescent must never be treated as a child, for that is a stage of life that he has surpassed. It is better to treat an adolescent as if he had greater value than he actually shows than as if he had less and let him feel that his merits and self-respect are disregarded.”

27. “You punch me, I punch back. I do not believe it's good for one's self-respect to be a punching bag.”

28. “People often confuse self-respect with arrogance. I believe that there is a very thin line between the two. Balance between the two is often what leads to happiness.”

29. “I would not send a poor girl into the world, ignorant of the snares that beset her path; nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power or the will to watch and guard herself.”

30. “I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.”

31. “The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.”

32. “I should have forfeited my own self-respect, and perhaps the good opinion of my countrymen, if I had failed to resent such an injury by calling the offender in question to a personal account.”

33. “There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.”

34. “But I know that trying to black out my past with oblivion will just damage my future. I made the decision to stop running from my fears, and to walk slowly and deliberately towards self-nurture, self-respect, and better mental and physical health.”

35. “When you know that you can overcome challenges, you do gain that self-respect, and then you won't end up in a situation that you regret later on.”

36. “I never let anyone lose their self-respect and make them wait in my office, or hurt them with my words, thoughts or actions. I give my e-mail address to anyone who seeks me out. I ask them to send me their work, and if I like it, I give them an opportunity.”

37. “The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.”

38. “Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.”

39. “I want to go down as a champion who redeemed himself, made up for letting everyone down and regained his self-respect.”

40. “I definitely think that, for a woman, the biggest turn-on is the mind. Otherwise, obviously you want someone who keeps up with himself and has self-respect and self-confidence.”

41. “My self-respect is very dear to me.”

42. “The Boys and Girls Club taught me a lot about sportsmanship, humility, self-respect.”

43. “Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough.”

44. “But, sir, they have written me down upon the history of the country as worthy of expulsion, and in no unkindness I must tell them that for all future time my self-respect requires that I shall pass them as strangers.”

45. “It is not the money but the self-respect and wanting to create good music.”

46. “We don't need bigger cars or fancier clothes. We need self-respect, identity, community, love, variety, beauty, challenge and a purpose in living that is greater than material accumulation.”

47. “There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people's safety and greatness.”

48. “Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.”

49. “In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.”

50. “So, then you find yourself in a situation where you have to do things because they're on offer to you, because you don't have much self-respect left. You just can't say no, even to something that you've never done before. You just can't help yourself.”

51. “Even Catholic parishes today are not wanting for talent. But no serious singer or organist will get anywhere near the typical music program, at least if he wants to retain his self-respect.”

52. “So I continued through my next school, which takes me up to the age of 17, moving from the bottom stream of one year into the bottom stream of the next year, all the way through. I showed other talents which gave me self-respect, which is fine.”

53. “You start to look at it with a deeper respect and I think that deeper respect for what you do builds more self-respect.”

54. “The fact is, if a young man is naturally indolent, the spur of necessity will drive him but a very little way, while the having enough to live upon is often the means of preserving his self-respect.”

55. “I wasn't in school often enough to really belong to a 'clique,' but my friends all studied hard and got pretty good grades. They were good people with self-respect. I still like to be friends with people I admire something about; I really believe that we become like the people we're surrounded by, so I choose my friends carefully!”

56. “Find your self-respect now. Don't dumb yourselves down. Think of yourself as capable and worthy of finding a guy who is going to respect you, too. It's so important, I mean, and the confidence you get from feeling smart and tackling something like mathematics, which is a challenge, right? Math is hard.”

57. “Given the opportunity, under the right conditions, two cells from wildly different sources, a yeast cell, say, and a chicken erythrocyte, will touch, fuse, and the two nuclei will then fuse as well, and the new hybrid cell will now divide into monstrous progeny. Naked cells, lacking self-respect, do not seem to have any sense of self.”

58. “I think so many people tend to think of faith as blind adherence to a dogma or unquestioned surrender to an authority figure, and the result is losing self-respect and losing our own sense of what is true. And I don't think of faith in those terms at all.”

59. “I was a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me, and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.”

60. “Being Christian towards poor people means trying to improve their lives and give them back some self-respect.”

61. “The challenge to America is to extend to Asia the defensive shield of American power in forms consonant with Asian freedom and self-respect.”

62. “Self-respect, the value of 'face,' is universal but is most pronounced in China, then in Japan where the Confucian ethic is most influential.”

63. “Being traditional is a choice for me. South Indian families bring up their children with a sense of freedom, self-respect and self-value. We do whatever we have to with earnestness and honesty, including being uninhibited. Yet we hold onto our roots.”

64. “I've never had to fight for a role. Call it my ego or my self-respect, but I won't pick up the phone and call a producer and fight or ask for a role. That's not me. I've always got the best, and my work speaks for itself.”

65. “Here's the thing: you're not really ready for love until you have enough self-respect that if you met your exact self, but in a guy, you would totally, completely, absolutely want to be with him.”

66. “I've lost a lot of teeth and square yards of hide. But I've never lost my self-respect, and I've kept what I find in few men of my age - my enthusiasm.”

67. “I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.”

68. “I try to write about a woman finding her self-respect, valuing herself, and liking herself again. But what one desperately wants now is to write a proper novel.”

69. “For your own self-respect and sanity, your creative freedom, you have to be careful that you don't rely too much on other people's opinions of what you do because it can stunt and inhibit you.”

70. “When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, inner life in which freedom lives. In which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.”

71. “Most of the big banks were shot through with short-termism, deceptive practices and self-dealing. We must institute basic changes in corporate governance and in management practice to restore responsibility and honesty for the sake of the economy and for the self-respect of the country.”

72. “My mother persevered through much adversity because she possessed faith in God, self-respect, and an awareness of history; most especially, she was astute in Africa's significant contribution to world history. Sister Betty refused to live her life as a victim.”

73. “When you get into a car, and there's trash, or it's dirty, or one of the hubcaps is off, you're like, 'Come on, dude.' Every woman likes the confidence and self-respect that says, 'I get oil changes. I look after my vehicle.' That's what I recommend: Act like you don't care, but take care of your body.”

74. “When I was in high school, I looked for the black presence in a British historical tradition - before too much slavery and empire - that would not cost me my self-respect.”

75. “My mother has a tremendous amount of pride and self-respect. She won't take assistance from anybody.”

76. “Self-sufficiency is vitally important to my self-respect. I never wanted to rely on my parents in that way, because I knew that if I got used to it, I'd be reliant all my life.”

77. “I have no qualms working on a quintessential Bollywood film, but I can't work on mindless no-brainers. I have too much self-respect for that.”

78. “Martin Luther King and Gandhi were not people who failed in self-respect. They were people of hope and great courage, and their courage was disciplined.”

79. “The fact that my parents were both educated and held certain values very dearly, like honesty, self-respect and integrity, meant that I could steer clear of many pitfalls.”

80. “I think everyone should be creative in some way, otherwise you have no self-respect. That's why I believe in women working.”

81. “HBOS had robbed me of my marriage, my family, my businesses, my longstanding friend and business partner, my income, my investments, my self-respect, my reputation, my privacy, my physical and mental health. It cost me my security, my image rights, my collection of classic cars - and very nearly my life.”

82. “I am not an ambitious guy, I have a very laidback attitude; money for me is less important than self-respect and ideals.”

83. “VANITY' is a celebration of beauty, self-identity, and self-respect. We want people to leave the show feeling okay to accept themselves - not to hold back and be ashamed of the extravagances they like to indulge in. We should be able to celebrate these things because they are part of living and we all strive for them.”

84. “Self-respect is the more important attribute than money and hence I am walking out of my debut Bollywood directorial venture 'Laxmmi Bomb.'”

85. “Boots radiates a unique kind of class - not a glamour, but enough self-respect to not degrade itself with an in-store radio station.”