100 Self Confidence Builders To Get You Through Anything
It is truly astonishing that so many people from diverse walks of life and different centuries agree so significantly on the core definition of self-confidence. From Herodotus, a historian born in 484 BC to prominent people today, these authors share their wisdom about self-confidence in their quotes.
Enjoy them and remember them in the tough spots. It’s possible; they just might get you through!
1. If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
-Henry David Thoreau
2. Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.
-Norman Vincent Peale
3. As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
-Johann Von Goethe
4. It’s so important to believe in yourself. Believe that you can do it, under any circumstances. Because if you believe you can, then you really will. That belief just keeps you searching for the answers, and then pretty soon you get it.
-Wally “Famous” Amos
5. Search and you will find that at the base and birth of every great business organization was an enthusiast, a man consumed with earnestness of purpose, with confidence in his powers, with faith in the worthwhileness of his endeavors.
-BC Forbes
6. My mind to me a kingdom is.
-Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford
7. I’ve always seen myself as a winner, even as a kid. If I hadn’t, I just might have gone down the drain a couple of times. I’ve got something inside of me, peasantlike and stubborn, and I’m in it ’til the end of the race.
-Truman Capote
8. It is as proper to have pride in oneself as it is ridiculous to show it to others.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld
9. As is our confidence, so is our capacity.
-William Hazlitt
10. Calm self-confidence is as far from conceit as the desire to earn a decent living is remote from greed.
-Channing Pollock
11. Only so far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do anything worth doing.
-Frederick W. Robertson
12. To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
-Joan Didion
13. Experience tells you what to do; confidence allows you to do it.
-Stan Smith
14. Confidence is that feeling by which the mind embarks on great and honorable courses with a sure hope and trust in itself.
-Cicero
15. If a man doesn’t delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?
– Sherwood Anderson
16. Your success depends mainly upon what you think of yourself and whether you believe in yourself.
-William JH Boetcker
17. Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.
-Clementine Paddleford
18. They conquer who believe they can.
-John Dryden
19. Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.
-Andrew Carnegie
20. Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control. These three alone lead to sovereign power.
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson
21. Faith in oneself…is the best and safest course.
-Michelangelo
22. There’s one blessing only, the source and cornerstone of beatitude: confidence in self.
-Marcus Annaeus Seneca
23. Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.
-Bertrand Russell
24. Self-trust is the first secret of success.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
25. I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.
-William Ernest Henley
26. Once you get rid of the idea that you must please other people before you please yourself, and you begin to follow your own instincts–only then can you be successful. You become more satisfied, and when you are other people tend to be satisfied by what you do.
-Raquel Welch
27. There is overwhelming evidence that the higher the level of self-esteem, the more likely one will treat others with respect, kindness, and generosity. People who do not experience self-love have little or no capacity to love others.
-Nathaniel Branden
28. Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.
-Helen Keller
29. The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you.
-William Jennings Bryan
30. Class is an aura of confidence that is being sure without being cocky. Class has nothing to do with money. Class never runs scared. It is self-discipline and self-knowledge. It’s the surefootedness that comes with having proved you can meet life.
-Ann Landers
31. Confidence…is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life.
-John Dewey
32. Measure yourself by your best moments, not by your worst. We are too prone to judge ourselves by our moments of despondency and depression.
-Robert Johnson
33. “Glamour” is assurance. It is a kind of knowing that you are all right in every way, mentally and physically and in appearance, and that, whatever the occasion or the situation, you are equal to it.
-Marlene Dietrich
34. Perhaps I am stronger than I think.
-Thomas Merton
35. Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances.
-Bruce Barton
36. I always thought I should be treated like a star.
-Madonna
37. Real adulthood is the result of two qualities: self-discipline and self-reliance. The process of developing them together in balance is called maturing.
-JW Jepson
38. He who would be well taken care of must take care of himself.
-William Graham Sumner
39. The future is not in the hands of fate, but in ours.
-Jules Jusserano
40. What pulls the strings is the force hidden within; there lies…the real man.
-Marcus Aurelius
41. He who is plenteously provided for from within needs but little from without.
-Johann von Goethe
42. I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.
-Louisa May Alcott
43. If you want a thing done, go; if not, send.
-Benjamin Franklin
44. I have always regarded myself as the pillar of my life.
-Meryl Streep
45. Do not rely completely on any other human being, however dear. We meet all of life’s greatest tests alone.
-Agnes MacPhail
46. If it is to be, it is up to me.
-Anon
47. You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.
-Irish Proverb
48. The destiny of man is in his own soul.
-Herodotus
49. Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
50. There are three types of baseball players — those who make it happen, those who watch it happen, and those who wonder what happened.
-Tommy Lasorda
51. Only those means of security are good, are certain, are lasting, that depend on yourself and your own vigor.
-Niccolo Machiavelli
52. There ain’t nothing from the outside can lick any of us.
-Margaret Mitchell
53. I’ve never met a person, I don’t care what his condition, in whom I could not see possibilities. I don’t care how much a man may consider himself a failure, I believe in him, for he can change the thing that is wrong in his life anytime he is prepared and ready to do it. Whenever he develops the desire, he can take away from his life the thing that is defeating it. The capacity for reformation and change lies within.
-Preston Bradley
54. God, why do I storm heaven for answers that are already in my heart? Every grace I need has already been given me. Oh, lead me to the Beyond within.
-Macrina Wieherkehr
55. Knowing that we can be loved exactly as we are gives us all the best opportunity for growing into the healthiest of people.
– Fred Rogers
56. Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.
-Dr. Alexis Carrel
57. It is what you are inside that matters. You, yourself, are your only real capital.
-Vladimir Zworykin
58. Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creature of man. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.
-Benjamin Disraeli
59. Up to a point a man’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him, then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be…Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow.
-Louis L’Amour
60. Every time I start a picture…I feel the same fear, the same self-doubts…and I have only one source on which I can draw, because it comes from within me.
-Federico Fellini
61. It is our relationship to circumstances that determines their influence over us. The same wind that carries one vessel into port may blow another off shore.
-Christian Bovee
62. There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
-Aldous Huxley
63. Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.
-Anne Frank
64. A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction.
-Rita Mae Brown
65. I would not sit waiting for some value tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime….I would make something happen.
-Louis L’Amour
66. Circumstances are the rulers of the weak; they are but the instruments of the wise.
-Samuel Lover
67. You have to take it as it happens, but you should try to make it happen the way you want to take it.
-Old German Proverb
68. Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into something beautiful, or debase it into ugliness. It’s in our hands.
-Cathy Better
69. Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life.
-Herbert Otto
70. People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. The people who get on in this world are they who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.
-George Bernard Shaw
71. Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.
-Francis Bacon
72. We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers — you can blame anyone, but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you want to change, you’re the one who has got to change. It’s as simple as that, isn’t it?
-Katharine Hepburn
73. How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.
-Marcus Aurelius
74. Be yourself and think for yourself; and while your conclusions may not be infallible, they will be nearer right than the conclusions forced upon you.
-Elbert Hubbard
75. Though reading and conversation may furnish us with many ideas of men and things, our own meditation must form our judgment.
-Isaac Watts
76. Each of us makes his own weather, determines the color of the skies in the emotional universe which he inhabits.
-Fulton J. Sheen
77. I am responsible for my own well-being, my own happiness. The choices and decisions I make regarding my life directly influence the quality of my days.
-Kathleen Andrus
78. Learn to depend upon yourself by doing things in accordance with your own way of thinking.
-Grenville Kleiser
79. When I have been unhappy, I have heard an opera…and it seemed the shrieking of winds; when I am happy, a sparrow’s chirp is delicious to me. But it is not the chirp that makes me happy, but I that make it sweet.
-John Ruskin
80. Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.
-Josiah Royce
81. Blame yourself if you have no branches or leaves, don’t accuse the sun of partiality.
-Chinese Proverb
82. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
83. It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
-Agnes Repplier
84. No one gives you joy or sorrow….We gather the consequences of our own deeds.
-Garuda Purana
85. In the long run we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
-Eleanor Roosevelt
86. Felicity, felicity…is quaffed out of a golden cup…the flavour is with you alone, and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.
-Joseph Conrad
87. Some pursue happiness–others create it.
-Anon
88. To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread.
-Charles Caleb Colton
89. To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you that you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
90. If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
-Albert Camus
91. Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral, and subject to chance.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
92. Under normal periods, any man’s success hinges about 5 percent on what others do for him and 95 percent on what he does.
-James A. Worsham
93. No man will succeed unless he is steady to face and overcome difficulties and prepared to assume responsibilities.
-William JH Boetcker
94. Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
-William Jennings Bryan
95. I am my own heaven and hell!
-JCF von Schiller
96. Every man is the architect of his own fortune.
-Sallust
97. A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
-Francis Bacon
98. If people are suffering, then they must look within themselves….Happiness is not something readymade [Buddha] can give you. It comes from your own actions.
-The Dalai Lama
99. Man is still responsible….His success lies not with the stars, but with himself. He must carry on the fight of self-correction and discipline.
-Frank Curtis Williams
100. To character and success, two things, contradictory as they may seem, must go together–humble dependence and manly independence; humble dependence on God and manly reliance on self.
-William Wordsworth