Self Deprecation Quotes

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.”
― Epictetus

“when you walk, you look like you’re trying to disappear.
your back is gonna be fucked up.
why do you think change is so hard? is it because you’re afraid?
people might think you’re pretty, but they’ll never love you.
you talk like you’re apologizing for your own voice.
speak up.
grow up.
find your spine, stop shrinking.
there is nothing brave about keeping silent.
how many times have you been in love? I can’t picture it ever happening for you.
you lie because it makes you feel free. this is a prison.
you’re always gonna think about him. you will never get him out of your system.
I wish I never had to see you again.
you poor thing.
go to hell.
you may be a nice person but you will never be a good person.
no one is ever going to want to touch you.
is there a vision in your head of who you want to be?
you do not have the strength to become her.
there is no boat big enough to keep you from drowning in the sea of yourself.
go to bed, baby.
you are tired from all of this nothing.
sleep.
rest.”
― Caitlyn Siehl

“There's no room for demons when you're self-possessed.”
― Carrie Fisher

“All the shitty stuff people do to themselves... it can all be the same thing, you know? Just a way to drown out your own voice. To kill your memories without having to kill yourself.”
― Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies

“They all laughed when I said I'd become a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now.”
― Bob Monkhouse, Crying With Laughter: My Life Story

“Mine, is a wicked world of pure fascinastion.”
― Carroll Bryant

“After years of self deprecating behavior, I’ve never learned how to properly take a compliment. A part of me wants to argue with him, to tell him there’s nothing special about me.”
― Brynna Gabrielson, Starkissed

“But it doesn't make sense for you to love me...”
― Stephenie Meyer, New Moon

“Don't be afraid! We won't make an author of you, while there's an honest trade to be learnt, or brick-making to turn to.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.
Scruples are alien to the black panther.
Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.
The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.

The self-critical jackal does not exist.
The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly
live as they live and are glad of it.

The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilos
but in other respects it is light.

There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun.”
― Wislawa Szymborska

“The average person’s self-esteem is so low that they are way less frequently surprised that they love someone than they are surprised that someone loves them.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Goodness, I was already a dork most of the times. I didn't need to be a drunk or high dork.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, The Problem with Forever

“Mirrors: they show you what you lack, not what you have.”
― Marty Rubin

“One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses—'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing'—along with detailed refutations and denunciations by Abraham ibn Ezra and others. These exciting anathemas, of course, ensured that his worrying 'questions' would remain current for as long as the Orthodox commentaries would be read. In this way, rather as when Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' Jewishness contrives irony at its own expense. If there is one characteristic of Jews that I admire, it is that irony is seldom if ever wasted on them.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Strange that people are happy to adopt epithets they would fight to the death to throw off had they been imposed.”
― Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

“I should have learned mindfulness, and it’s too late now because it’s no good learning it when you’re already in crisis: you have to start when things are good. But only the very, very oddest would think, Hey, my life is perfect. I know! I’ll sit and waste twenty minutes Observing My Thoughts without Judgement.”
― Marian Keyes, The Break

“There are few things so disarming as one who laughs well at her own expense.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“Fuck them all. I ought to have that tattooed on my forehead, for all the times I've thought it. Usually I am in transit, speeding in my Jeep until my lungs give out. Today, I'm driving ninety-five down 95. I weave in and out of traffic, sewing up a scar. People yell at me behind their closed windows. I give them the finger.

It would solve a thousand problems if I rolled the Jeep over an embankment. It's not like I haven't thought about it, you know. On my license, it says I'm an organ donor, but the truth is I'd consider being an organ martyr. I'm sure I'm worth a lot more dead than alive--the sum of the parts equals more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“He presses my hand and he says he loves me,
Which I find an admirable peculiarity.”
― W.H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening: Songs, Ballads, Lullabies, Limericks & Other Light Verse

“She was named Jocaminca fforkes, with two small 'f's - as if having two 'f's wasn't pretentious enough”
― Jasper Fforde, The Constant Rabbit

“There's no law that says you have to be dissatisfied or disappointed with who you are.”
― Marty Rubin

“Archie Henderson has won no awards, written no books and never played any representative sport. He was an under-11 tournament-winning tennis player as a boy, but left the game when he discovered rugby where he was one of the worst flyhalves he can remember. This did not prevent him from having opinions on most things in sport.

His moment of glory came in 1970 when he predicted—correctly as it turned out—that Griquas would beat the Blue Bulls (then still the meekly named Noord-Transvaal) in the Currie Cup final. It is something for which he has never been forgiven by the powers-that-be at Loftus. Archie has played cricket in South Africa and India and gave the bowling term military medium a new and more pacifist interpretation. His greatest ambition was to score a century on Llandudno beach before the tide came in.”
― Archie Henderson

“...sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I'm here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable... one's definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that's charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.”
― Ocean Vuong

“Why do people assume I know more than I do? I’m an idiot about most things.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“there are so many things wrong with me, so many cracks in my foundation, that patching one will hardly help with the stability of the whole. One less corner where the cold seeps in doesn’t matter when the roof still needs fixing and the doors don’t sit right in their frames and why bother with one crack when the whole house is falling down around you? I’ll spend my whole life trying to repair myself and still die a broken person. It sounds exhausting.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“One day, she told me her favorite color was green. Do you know how much green I see in a day? Enough to remember any other color ain’t her favorite. Green. That’s a whole lifetime with a girl whose face emerges on leaves, tennis courts, the billboard on every nearest passion pit, the emerald fabric of my curtains, hotel salads, on a crumpled Washington, and the two forest eyes of my own that look back at me in the mirror and say, “Diana #1, Diana #2.” Ain’t that a bite. One day, I will lay outside to daydream about her for so long, fungi will grow on my pathetic body, plaguing me with her favorite color. Will she love my algae then?”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Sometimes I just forget how to "people.”
― J.E. Birk, Booklover

“I sometimes think that what civilized serenity the British people possess, and small but real ability to smile at themselves, is chiefly due to their good luck in having had William Shakespeare born one of their company.”
― Fritz Leiber, Four Ghosts in Hamlet

“... there are so many things wrong with me, so many cracks in my foundation, that patching one will hardly help with the stability of the whole. One less corner where the cold seeps in doesn’t matter when the roof still needs fixing and the doors don’t sit right in their frames and why bother with one crack when the whole house is falling down around you? I’ll spend my whole life trying to repair myself and still die a broken person. It sounds exhausting.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks