earning self-respect

people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they

People who trust themselves trust themselves because they’re honest with themselves. More specifically, they’re honest about what they need to restrict themselves from or altogether avoid. We think that the more we trust ourselves, the fewer boundaries we’ll need; the opposite is true. The people who trust themselves the most are the ones who honor

“Each man had only one genuine vocation — to find the way to himself…. His task was to discover his own destiny — not an arbitrary one — and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence. -Frederick Douglass