Self Contempt Quotes

“I must give myself permission not to like myself. It's ok. Plenty of other people don't like me either. And I have much higher standards.”
― Quentin R. Bufogle

“Sleeping gave me time off from myself — a delicious sort of respite. Without it I grow overfamiliar, sticky with self-contempt.”
― Julia Armfield, Salt Slow

“Shame evokes anxiety about what will happen if someone really knows is, but, because it is impossible to for anxiety and anger to be felt simultaneously, we can dream our anxiety by employing anger or rage in the form of contempt... Contempt, because it feels more powerful has always helped us feel safer and more powerful than the anxiety we feel when we experience shame. [3]”
― Wendy Mahill, Growing a Passionate Heart

“I've been depressed all day. I feel like such a fraud. People say how special and wonderful I am. I think,
"Can't they tell? "

—Nita, September 18, 1984”
― Sarah E. Olson, Becoming One: A Story of Triumph Over Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Contempt

The contempt I feel for others—for myself different, less internal than guilt.
 
It’s not that I think (or have ever thought) I was bad—through and through. I think I’m unattractive, unloveable, because I’m incomplete. It’s not what I am that’s wrong, it’s that I’m not more (responsive, alive, generous, considerate, original, sensitive, brave etc.).
 
My profoundest experience is of indifference, rather than censure.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“Demonisk er bare noe sludder jeg fant for å berge livet i ham. Hadde jeg ikke så gjort, hadde det stakkars svinet bukket under i selvforakt og fortvilelse for mange herrens år siden.”
― Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck

“She could have been there all along, he felt, but for some unknown, unarticulated reason, she had never lifted a finger to put her poems into circulation. It was the thing that had baffled him most about her, for in all other ways Anna was a person who stood up for herself and fought hard for what she believed in, and she knew damned well that her poems were good. Doubts, yes, despairing moments, yes, but what writer or artist doesn’t live in that shifting territory between confidence and self-contempt? The proof was in the fact that she had always shared her poems with him, not because he ever asked her but because she wanted to, either reading them out loud or handing him small sheafs of six or seven at once, and again and again he had responded to her new work by saying it was time to get off her ass and start publishing them, which was invariably followed by a diffident shrug from Anna, who sometimes added “You’re right” or “One of these days” or “We’ll see”, depending on her mood.”
― Paul Auster, Baumgartner