On Self-Hatred Quotes

“We would know that we deserved love not because of how perfect and accomplished we were, but because of how broken and desperate we remained. We would understand that the noblest kind of love springs from sympathy for what is weak and malformed, not from admiration for what is flawless and serene.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“Small children naturally turn injury done to them into dislike of themselves. They ask not so much ‘Why does my parent fail to care for me?’ as ‘How might I have failed this admirable person?’ They hate themselves rather than doubting those who should be protecting them; shame replaces anger. It feels, on balance, like the safer option. A”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“A part of us is responding to adult challenges with the vulnerability of a child who faced disdain on a scale they couldn’t master.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“We thought it was our perfections that would attract admiration; we now see it is our sorrows that cement fellow-feeling.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“To hate ourselves alone and in private, with intensity and focus, is to miss out on a more bounteous appreciation of our species-wide awfulness, which we should lament rather than castigate ourselves for. There is so much that we might dislike about who we are from close up, but we would be wiser and kinder to step back and feel sorry for the species, which has been making a mess of things since the early fateful days in Eden.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“A degree of regret may sometimes be helpful: it can help us to take stock of errors and to avoid the worst of the pitfalls next time. But runaway self-hatred serves no useful purpose; it is, in its masochistic way, an indulgence we can’t afford. We may be foolish, but this doesn’t single us out as particularly awful or unusual; it only confirms that we belong to the human race, a fact for which we deserve limitless sympathy and compassion.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“Similarly, the properly self-loving person isn’t the one who congratulates themselves when they have pulled off an astonishing feat; it’s the one who knows how to speak to themselves in a kind voice when it has all gone wrong, who can remain kind in the face of ill fortune, who doesn’t have to berate or criticise themselves without mercy.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“A healthy parent does not require a child to perform in order to lend them their attention; they may be pleased when the child is doing well, they may be proud of them at moments of victory, but they do not make performance the sine qua non of their love.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“We need to come to a dispiriting but emancipating realisation: those who demand to be impressed by their own offspring are not worthy of impressing; they are ill.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“We should afford more regularly to exchange self-hatred for lawful and honourable expressions of annoyance.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“Our sense of ourselves, rigidly contemporary though it proposes itself to be, is almost always the residue of how others in the distant past made us feel. We like or dislike ourselves to the extent that we were once liked or disliked by those in whose orbit we developed.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“In the early days and months, a beloved young child is placed at the very centre of the parental universe. For a time, they are the one around whom everything else revolves. When they scream for milk, others come quickly; when they pull their first smile, others are amazed; if they have something to say, others listen. Such focus is not a recipe for limitless egoism; we can only hope to become properly modest and able to take care of others when we have had an early taste of total omnipotence. A fulsome experience of infantile egoism is what underpins the selflessness of the future adult.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“The baby who is held, kindly tickled, sympathised with and gently soothed isn’t just being indulged in the present, they are being given a life-long immunity from the temptation to do away with themselves when hostile winds start to blow.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“If criticism from outside proves devastating, it is because it so readily joins forces with an infinitely more strident and more aggressive form of criticism that has long existed inside of us.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“It is a sign
of immense
psychological
privilege to
know how to be
ordinary.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“It requires a lot of self-love to accept that one may be a bit of a fool of whom most people don’t think very much and who will die leaving the universe undisturbed. It is a sign of immense psychological privilege to know how to be ordinary.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“A person needs to hate themselves to a truly uncommon degree in order to insist that everyone must listen to what they have to say, that no one can disagree and that they are always the most important person in the room. Outsized regard for oneself is not the outcome of boundless self-love, it is the diseased flower of a terrified, self-doubting mind.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“We unknowingly impute to strangers the nasty comments that we are experts at making to ourselves; our self-image returns to haunt us in the assumed views of others.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“The truly blessed among us are not those with perfect symmetry; they are those whose past affords them the luxury not to care too much what the mirror happens to say.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“The high achievers have been driven to act not simply from talent or creativity, energy and skill (though these are no doubt present as well) but from a primordial sense that there is something shameful about them in their basic state, and that they must hence clothe themselves in the garments of success to escape the humiliation of their true selves.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“Many high achievers, for all their accomplishments, cannot trust in a basic idea: that it might be acceptable to be themselves, outside of any acclaim, notice or distinction. Simply being is not enough; their right to exist can only be assured by constant doing. Their frantic activity masks an underlying unquenchable doubt as to their acceptability.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“The self-accepting are not surprised by evidence of where they have fallen short; they navigate the world with a strong sense of their inherent ridiculousness.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself

“Self-hatred is the bitter fruit of an ingrained sense of what we should be like. We hate the way we are because, somewhere in our evolution, we picked up some unyielding ideas about the way we should be: what we should have achieved, how many mistakes we should have made, how we should look, what others should be saying about us. We carry within us a gamut of expectations that remorselessly torment us and inflict on us some of the many symptoms of self-hatred: a tense spine, insomnia, malfunctioning bowels, a longing for but also discomfort about our achievements, a feeling of dread and, in the wake of crises, a desire to kill ourselves.”
― The School of Life, On Self-Hatred: Learning to like oneself