Inadequacy Quotes

“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.”
― Edna O'Brien, A Fanatic Heart

“Be careful not to mistake insecurity and inadequacy for humility! Humility has nothing to do with the insecure and inadequate! Just like arrogance has nothing to do with greatness!”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Most people felt lost after high school. Sometimes I felt like I'd never really been found in the first place.”
― Lish McBride, Hold Me Closer, Necromancer

“Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. (The perfect is the enemy of the good.)”
― voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary

“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is "I didnt get enough sleep." The next one is "I don't have enough time." Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don't have enough of... Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn't get, or didn't get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack... This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life”
― Lynne Twist, The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

“But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.”
― Lorrie Moore

“You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.”
― Will Self

“I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Compassion without discipline is egregious self-sabotage.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“Rules are made to be broken, but hearts are broken to be made.
It is a big miracle to be loved "because" of your inadequacies, not "despite" them.
And nothing can be as fascinating as walking tall on the same road that once witnessed your fall.”
― Olaotan Fawehinmi, The Soldier Within

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”
― Marianne Williamson

“We enslave in the manner we talk to ourselves. But the truth is, God already set us free. He secured our release. To constantly hurt ourselves, resting in our inadequacy, is to call Him a LIAR.”
― Mary E. DeMuth, Wall Around Your Heart

“When you let go of your bitterness, inadequacy, & incompleteness, the more you tap into your true creative genius. Unchain your inner voice!”
― Assegid Habtewold, The 9 Cardinal Building Blocks: For continued success in leadership

“I carry a persistent fear that my thoughts are incorrect, or silly, or so obvious they aren’t worth saying. Suddenly I’m a little boy, sitting in class like a solemn ghost. Mrs. Larson asks me a question, all the seven-year-old eyes in the room turn to me with expectation, and I’m frozen in place, terrified by the sudden realization that I’m expected to contribute. My cheeks flush and I want to go away to someplace safe—someplace like the woods or the eternal fields of green Illinois corn where I can watch and experience and listen without any demand to justify my existence. I’ve always been happy to be alone. God, however, never takes his eyes off me, and on my good days I believe that he is smiling, never demanding an answer other than the fact of myself. I exist as his redeemed creation, and that is, pleasantly, enough for him.”
― Andrew Peterson, Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making

“I've always felt the need to prove myself against other people. I mean, I'm quite a weak person physically, and I think in school, I wouldn't say I was bullied but you do feel scared sometimes, or frightened, and the only thing I thought I had that was different from other people was the fact that I was actually quite intelligent. I like reading and passing exams or whatever. But even things like A-Levels - say somebody else got straight As - I would not feel as good as them, because I didn't know what percentages we had. I wanted to know that I had ninety-eight per cent and they had ninety-five per cent. It wasn't enough. I felt next to somebody with the same qualifications as me, I would not feel as good. You don't even know what it means. So you're constantly trying to get better and improve all the time.”
― Rob Jovanovic, A Version of Reason: In Search of Richey Edwards

“You cannot be escorted by the belief of inadequacy and get to the destination of excellence. Go along with "a can do spirit" because that is the only companion!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes

“I wanted to be good but I wasn't sure if I was prepared”
― Leila Aboulela

“Outside, under the marquee of the hotel, he stood a moment as he did each night beneath the marquee of the Hotel Hyperion, while he decided what direction to take, what to do. And suddenly, realizing it was not the Hotel Hyperion, that the circumstances were quite different, he felt loneliness spring up like a dark forest all around him. The odd thing was, he felt no impulse to hurry after her, to find her somehow. What would he have to offer her except the history of weakness, loneliness, and inadequacy, the decline and fall of himself? He himself was the core of the loneliness around him, and its core was inadequacy. He was inadequate even in love.”
― Patricia Highsmith , Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith

“Will I someday pass into history having passed by God and therefore forfeited the opportunity to change my world and reap the blessing of being able to do so because I saw myself as inadequate to achieve either? And how long will it take me to realize that if I doggedly refuse to pass by God, my inadequacy is instantly irrelevant and I have in actuality begun to achieve these very things.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Yes, it's Lila who makes writing difficult. My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name: 2

“Yes, it's Lila who makes writing difficult. My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck. And her life continuously appears in mine in the words that I've uttered, in which there's often an echo of hers, in a particular gesture that is an adaptation of a gesture of hers, in my less which is such because of hermore, in my more which is the yielding to the force of her less. Not to mention what she never said but let me guess, what I didn't know and read later in her notebooks. Thus the story of the facts has to reckon with filters, deferments, partial truths, half lies: from it comes an arduous measurement of time passed that is based completely on the unreliable measuring device of words.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“Whatever you have learned, Harry, you must remember
That there is always more: we cannot rest in being
The impatient spectators of malice or stupidity.
We must try to penetrate the other private worlds
Of make-believe and fear. To rest in our own suffering
Is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion

“Much of our waking life is spent in a desperate struggle to persuade others that we are not what we fear ourselves to be, or what they may discover us to be if they see through our pretenses. Most people, most of the time, have a profound and unhappy awareness of the contrast between what they are and what they ought to be.”
― David Smail, Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety

“I'll do what Dr. Alsan always says.'
'And what's that?'
'Carry myself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.'
He grinned, and- there they were. The heart-stopping dimples. 'It will be fine, Olive.' His smile softened. 'And if not, at least it will be over.”
― Ali Hazelwood, The Love Hypothesis

“Prayer is knowing that what I ask for is always far bigger than what I could ever articulate, but it is never too big for God to understand nor is it ever too vast for Him to deliver.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Body dysmorphic disorder wedges itself between the sufferer’s desperation to connect and the fear that they might be rejected while attempting to do so. This serves the purpose of preventing rejection; if one is constantly dismissing oneself it becomes much more difficult to be rejected by another human being. For many highly sensitive body dysmorphic disorder patients, rejection is experienced as the ultimate proof that something must be inherently defective about them. For this to be the case is often interpreted as absolute confirmation that they can never be loved. Taking the risk of possible rejection might mean experiencing these dire consequences, and to most, the benefits do not out-weigh the consequences. Thus body dysmorphic disorder exists in the space of the relational ambivalence, completely changing the focus from fears of intimacy and fundamental feelings of inadequacy to excessive attention towards perceptible physical features.”
― Winograd Arie M, Face to Face with Body Dysmorphic Disorder: Psychotherapy and Clinical Insights

“To be rich and talented at the same time is rare but possible, but the most talented; the genius, is the one crippled and bulldozed into oblivion by the scourge of poverty.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“Due to the trauma, we experience the fear of rejection, inadequacy, and/or the fear of powerlessness itself.”
― Kenny Weiss

“Envy is a deadly sin that wants to rip away the blessings others have to feed your inadequacy.”
― Allene vanOirschot