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Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life.
He who is whipped oftenest, is whipped easiest.
Let the river flow and you will be liberated. Let yourself go with current and you will find yourself. Let the wind so blow and you will be able to break yourself free very much like a ripened fruit of self-respect that sheds itself away from the tree of dependence. Let yourself be blown away humbling as a fallen petal and you will find yourself above the lowly dust of ground, to finally discover the truth of your existence for yourself.
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
"Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself."
"Believe you know all the answers and you know all the answers. Believe you're a master and you are."
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.
Self-respect cannot be hunted. It cannot be purchased. It is never for sale. It cannot be fabricated out of public relations. It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when e suddenly realize that, knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the beautiful, we have served it; knowing the truth we have spoken it.
Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect.
In order to preserve your self-respect, it is sometimes necessary to lie and cheat.
The conquering of adversity produces strength of character, forges self-confidence, engenders self-respect, and assures success in righteous endeavor.
Live according to the ethics of excellence, and you can always stand proud. Pride - not vanity, but dignity and self-respect - should carry a lot of weight in helping you make decisions. Let pride help you decide.
There can be no failure to a man who has not lost his courage, his character, his self-respect, or his self-confidence. He is still a king.
It is better for one of you to take a rope, bring a load of firewood on his back, and sell it, God thereby preserving his self respect, than that he should beg from people whether they give him anything or refuse him.
Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.
Never esteem anything as of advantage to thee that shall make thee break thy word or lose thy self-respect.
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.
I cannot feel good about being a woman unless you feel bad about being a man. I cannot be proud of being black unless you are ashamed of being white. I cannot respect myself for being gay unless you are embarrassed that you are straight. Tolerance has been put by the boards; it is a stale and bitter thing and we will have none of it. Equality, likewise; is condescending at best and in truth intended to demean. If I am to achieve the inner harmony and self-respect that is my due, it will not suffice for you and I to be equals. No! Nothing less than superiority will make me happy. And to ensure that I make my point, I shall commend your libraries to the flames, rewrite your histories, purge your dictionaries, and arm the thought police with power to enforce political correctness in all speech and apprehension.
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.
The individual woman is required . . . a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.
In my day, we didn't have self-esteem, we had self-respect, and no more of it than we had earned.
There are times when each of us has to have some gumption to take a stand as to what we wish to preserve or change in order to maintain our self-respect and not be as "a reed shaken with the wind" (Matt. 11:7) . . . . We lose much credibility and strength, and we risk being weighed on an uneven balance, when, Don Quixote-like, we go around "tilting windmills". Ensign, Mar 2000, p. 2.
In handling men, there are three feelings that a man must not possess - fear, dislike and contempt. If he is afraid of men he cannot handle them. Neither can he influence them in his favor if he dislikes or scorns them. He must neither cringe nor sneer. He must have both self-respect and respect for others.
Conceited men often seem a harmless kind of men, who, by an overweening self-respect, relieve others from the duty of respecting them at all.
Sobriety, severity, and self-respect are the foundations of all true sociality.
No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
They cannot take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them.
To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect.
Self-respect is the very cement of character, without which character will not form nor stand; a personal ideal is the only possible foundation for self-respect, without which self-respect degenerates into vanity or conceit, or is lost entirely, its place being taken by worthlessness and the consciousness of worthlessness; and that is the end of all character. It is often said that if we do not respect ourselves no one else will respect us; this is rather a dangerous way to put it; let us rather say that if we are not worthy of our own respect we cannot claim the respect of others. True self-respect is a matter of being and never of mere seeming. As Paulsen says, "It is vanity that desires first of all to be seen and admired, and then, if possible, really to be something; whereas proper self esteem desires first of all to be something, and' then, if possible, to have its worth recognized."
