Self-assurance Quotes

A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally both in mind and body as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world and therefore, as an Englishman, always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth -- science -- which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth. (Leo Tolstoy)

Confidence and empowerment are cousins in my opinion. Empowerment comes from within and typically it's stemmed and fostered by self-assurance. To feel empowered is to feel free and that's when people do their best work. You can't fake confidence or empowerment.

Amy Jo Martin

The most important characteristic that has allowed me to succeed is confidence. I have always been comfortable in my own skin, and even when I was just starting out in my career, had the strength and self-assurance to ask tough questions and push for answers.

Heather Bresch

The aggressive Edwardian prosperity that lends so comfortable a background to Elgar's finales is now as strange to us as the England that produced Greensleeves and The Woodes so wilde. Stranger, in fact, and less sympathetic. In consequence much of Elgar's music, through no fault of its own, has for the present generation an almost intolerable air of smugness, self-assurance and autocratic benevolence.

Edward Elgar

The reputation of a Don Juan gives to a man the most dangerous power. Wise virgins resist it, but foolish virgins frequently yield to the desire to take a celebrated lover from a rival - even from a friend. This emotion is a complex one, mad up of vanity, respect for another woman's taste, and the need to establish self-assurance by winning a difficult victory. Don Juan chose his first mistresses; later he was chosen. Byron said that he had been raped oftener than anyone since the Trojan War.

André Maurois

I am driven to observe of the ultra-Darwinists the following features as symptomatic. First, to my eyes, is their almost unbelievable self-assurance, their breezy self-confidence.

Simon Conway Morris

Chrétien is nothing if not versatile: popular, recherché, allusive, insistent, arch, naïve, racy and demure...He has a dramatist's flair for the handling of dialogue, a deft and economic way with characterization, the sharp confidence of the logician in his handling of rhetorical figures and the self-assurance of the entertainer in the deployment of humour (he is master of the verbal nudge). It is his essential vivacity that one misses most in his imitators.

Chrétien de Troyes

It may indeed be true that in order to act we need a certain amount of self-confidence and intellectual self-assurance. It may also be true that the very form of expression, in which we clothe our thoughts, tends to impose upon them an absolute tone.

Karl Mannheim

The feeling of self-assurance derived from physical achievement always transfers itself to the mental sphere.

Stefan Zweig

The rational elites, obsessed by structure, have become increasingly authoritarian in a modern, administrative way. The citizens feel insulted and isolated. They look for someone to throw stones on their behalf. Any old stone will do. The cruder the better to crush the self-assurance of the obscure men and their obscure methods. The New Right, with its parody of democratic values, has been a crude but devastating stone with which to punish the modern elites. The New Left, which will eventually succeed it, could easily turn out to be equally crude.

John Ralston Saul

I haven't touched a piano in so many years. I couldn't play with such crippled fingers, even if I wanted to. For a time after my marriage I tried to keep up my music. But it was hopeless. One-night stands, cheap hotels, dirty trains, leaving children, never having a home - [She stares at her hands with fascinated disgust. ] See, Cathleen, how ugly they are! So maimed and crippled! You would think they'd been through some horrible accident! [She gives a strange little laugh. ] So they have, come to think of it. [She suddenly thrusts her hands behind her back. ] I won't look at them. They're worse than the foghorn for reminding me - [Then with defiant self-assurance. ] But even they can't touch me now. [She brings her hands from behind her back and deliberately stares at them - calmly. ] They're far away. I see them, but the pain has gone. (Eugene O'Neill)

My main difficulty was that I could not paint fast enough. My pictures are all moments of my life – I mean instantaneous visual experiences, generally noted very rapidly and spontaneously. When I begin to paint, it's like leaping suddenly into deep waters, and I never know beforehand whether I will be able to swim. Well, it was Kandinsky who taught me the technique of swimming. I mean that he taught me to work fast enough, and with enough self-assurance, to be able to achieve this kind of rapid and spontaneous recording of moments of life.

Gabriele Munter

Whatever that thing is that white people like in blacks, I don't have it. Maybe it's my arrogance or my self-assurance or the way I carry myself, but whatever it is, I don't have it.

Paul Mooney

Once you lose everything, what's the worst that's going to happen to you? You develop a self-assurance.

Roberto Goizueta

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

Sylvia Plath

We can enjoy a self-assurance that doesn't depend on the state of things outside ourselves, be it downturns or booms or whatever.

Desmond Tutu

Music was that area's only expression of self-assurance or escape. The music of the time was everything to almost everybody – listening and dancing to music, or aspiring to be this or that, was all people were interested in. All my family were studying music, and my girlfriends and I had all these pretend girl groups we used to be in after school – stuff like The Supremes... really silly.

Madonna (entertainer)

Of all the many talks I had in Washington, none gave me such pleasure as that with you. There were two reasons for this. In the first place, you are about my oldest friend. In the second place, your self-assurance and to me, at least, demonstrated ability, give me a great feeling of confidence about the future ... and I have the utmost confidence that through your efforts we will eventually beat the hell out of those bastards - "You name them; I'll shoot them!"

George S. Patton

My main difficulty was that I could not paint fast enough. . .When I begin to paint, it's like leaping suddenly into deep waters, and I never know beforehand whether I will be able to swim. Well, it was Kandinsky who taught me the technique of 'swimming'. I mean that he taught me to work fast enough, and with enough self-assurance, to be able to achieve this kind of rapid and spontaneous recording of moments of life.

Wassily Kandinsky