“The best way to build your self-confidence is with competence, not attention.”
“You are a woman in the prime of your life! You should march into a room with your head held high! Like you are walking onto a stage, a battlefield!”
“You can do anything, and you can do anything well.”
“Be in limits, life will never limit you.”
“Criticism is just someone else’s opinion. Even people who are experts in their fields are sometimes wrong. It is up to you to choose whether to believe some of it, none of it, or all of it. What you think is what counts.”
“I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it.”
“We are always the same age inside. ”
“Because one believes in oneself, one doesn t try to convince others. Because one is content with oneself, one doesn t need others approval. Because one accepts oneself, the whole world accepts him or her.”
“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”
“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
“You re gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that or a scented candle”
“Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit”
“Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.”
“I laugh at myself. I don t take myself completely seriously. I think that s another quality that people have to hold on to... you have to laugh, especially at yourself.”
“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
“I m not insecure. I ve been through way too much f**king sh*t to be insecure. I ve got huge balls. But I ve been humbled. That makes you grateful for every day you have.”
“Reading his autobiography many years later, I was astonished to find that Edward since boyhood had—not unlike Isaiah Berlin—often felt himself ungainly and ill-favored and awkward in bearing. He had always seemed to me quite the reverse: a touch dandyish perhaps but—as the saying goes—perfectly secure in his masculinity. On one occasion, after lunch in Georgetown, he took me with him to a renowned local tobacconist and asked to do something I had never witnessed before: try on a pipe. In case you ever wish to do this, here is the form: a solemn assistant produces a plastic envelope and fits it over the amber or ivory mouthpiece. You then clamp your teeth down to feel if the fit and weight are easy to your jaw. If not, then repeat with various stems until your browsing is complete. In those days I could have inhaled ten cigarettes and drunk three Tanqueray martinis in the time spent on such flaneur flippancy, but I admired the commitment to smoking nonetheless. Taking coffee with him once in a shopping mall in Stanford, I saw him suddenly register something over my shoulder. It was a ladies dress shop. He excused himself and dashed in, to emerge soon after with some fashionable and costly looking bags. Mariam, he said as if by way of explanation, has never worn anything that I have not bought for her. On another occasion in Manhattan, after acting as a magnificent, encyclopedic guide around the gorgeous Andalusia (Al-Andalus) exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, he was giving lunch to Carol and to me when she noticed that her purse had been lost or stolen. At once, he was at her service, not only suggesting shops in the vicinity where a replacement might be found, but also offering to be her guide and advisor until she had selected a suitable new sac à main. I could no more have proposed myself for such an expedition than suggested myself as a cosmonaut, so what this says about my own heterosexual confidence I leave to others.”