Boys Self Image Quotes

Memories demand attention, and these memories will have teeth. ~ C. Kennedy

In her book Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, Carol Tavris recounts a story about a Bengali cobra that liked to bite passing villagers. One day a swami - a man who has achieved self-mastery - convinces the snake that biting is wrong. The cobra vows to stop immediately, and does. Before long, the village boys grow unafraid of the snake and start to abuse him. Battered and bloodied, the snake complains to the swami that this is what came of keeping his promise.
"I told you not to bite," said the swami, "but I did not tell you not to hiss."
"Many people, like the swami's cobra, confuse the hiss with the bite," writes Tavris. ~ Susan Cain

Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant. ~ Rollo May

Got a little red line that tells you, boy where the razor's been. ~ Tori Amos

Every man and woman alive is gifted by God in some special way. People who have a self-image of worth are going to see value in what they do. This is the attitude that motivates them to be and to do their best. It's a drive that comes from within people. ~ William Walton

Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Accept yourself in a way you are created ~ Sunday Adelaja

The world offers us a lot of mirrors, and we spend a whole lot of time standing in front of a whole lot of them. And regardless of which one of these many mirrors we choose, it will never be large enough to take in 'all that we are' in order to reflect 'all that we are' back to us. For God made you far too marvelous for the mirrors of men. Therefore, you might want to quit standing in front of them. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror?
...
The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection?
In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon. ~ Kevin Kelly

Singapore's tragedy is not the absence of idealism, but that it systematically rewards the individualistic majority and discourages the socially-conscious minority. This is at odds with Singapore's self-image as a communitarian Asian society, an image conjured up largely to justify the protection of family values and paternalistic government. In truth, the overwhelming ethos is to mind your own business. Singapore's embrace of the market forces - based on the PAP's clear appreciation of the fact that people's desire to live in comfort is the most powerful force for civilisation's progress - has provided rich incentives for Singaporeans to work hard, and create wealth. But its exercise of illiberal controls to maintain ownership of the public sphere adds up to a heavy tax on thinking socially and acting politically. The public has been privatised. ~ Cherian George

We waste a lot of time building an image we want the world to see instead of taking responsibility for breaking through the limits we create in our own heads and becoming who we were made to be ~ Jordan Lee Dooley

We are always harshest upon those foibles we see in others that we know bedevil our own natures - the ones that most gravely misbecome our self image - for blame is always easier than shame. ~ Maria Popova

Chambers (1986) argues that contemporary metropolitan society produces a culture of the spectacle in which the realization of the "self" is not achieved in the depth of one's inner being, but on the surface, through style, through image, through "a series of theatrical gestures" (p.11). ~ John Fiske

I would say that just as easy as a person puts on a raincoat and opens their umbrella before stepping out on a rainy day, you too must put on a new concept of yourself and never take it off, nor pull the umbrella of your imagination down until you see the sun shining on the new situation that you have imagined. You must never be convinced that you are being drenched in your old reality, regardless of how much others are absorbed in it. What is true for them is not true for you, because they are not living in your world. They are not living in your raincoat nor are they living beneath the umbrella of consciousness that you have raised. They may be completely soaked in their world while you remain poised and untouched by unfavorable conditions in your own. ~ Curtis Tyrone Jones

[H]is mouth pursed, but pursed in American, more generous than English pursing, ready for broader vowels and less mincing sounds. His body was long and lean and trim; he had American hips, ready for a neat belt and the faraway ghost of a gunbelt. ~ A.S. Byatt

Boys with a 'failure to launch' are invisible to most girls. With poor social skills, the boys feel anger at their fear of being rejected and self-loathing at their inability to compete. ~ Warren Farrell

The same God who loves us as we are also loves us to much to leave us as we are. Perhpas because we tend to hold to ideas about God that reflect our own suppositions and fears, more than God's self-revelation. We reduce God to our own dimensions, ascribing to him our own reactions and responses, especially our own petty and conditional kind of love, and so end up believing in a God cast in our own image and likeness.

But the true God, the living God, is entirely "other":. Precisely from this radical otherness derives the inscrutable and transcendent nature of divine love-- for which our limited human love is but a distant metaphor. God's love is much more than our human love simply multiplied and expanded. God's love for us will ever be mystery; unfathomable, awesome, entirely beyond human expectation.

Precisely because God's love is something "no eyes has seen, nor ear heard nor the heart of man conceived" (1 Cor 2:9), Mother Teresa meditated on it continuously, and encouraged us to do the same, to continue plumbing this mystery more deeply. To this end she invites us: "Try to deepen your understanding of these two words, 'Thirst of God.; ~ Joseph Langford

Update your version of me because I'm not the same person I was before. If you don't get that, you don't get me. ~ Toni Sorenson

Islam's prohibitions against pictoral representation of the human being have prevented the ubiquitous spread of the use of the female body for corporate purposes. Advertisements do not feature superfluous female body there to titillate potential buyer. In advertisements...image is not advanced as an ideal to which other women should aspire. Hence the use of images of women (and men) does not promote the phenomenon of self-correcting and self-policing, as is the case with the use of images in the mainstream Western culture. ~ Katherine Bullock

They were living to themselves: self, with its hopes, and promises, and dreams, still had hold of them; but the Lord began to fulfill their prayers. They had asked for contrition, and He sent them sorrow; they had asked for purity, and He sent them thrilling anguish; they had asked to be meek, and He had broken their hearts; they has asked to be dead to the world, and He slew all their living hopes; they had asked to be made like unto Him, and He placed them in the furnace, sitting by "as a refiner of silver," till they should reflect His image; they had asked to lay hold of His cross, and when He had reached it out to them, it lacerated their hands. They had asked they knew not what, nor how; but He had taken them at their word, and granted them all their petitions. They were hardly willing to follow so far, or to draw so nigh to Him. They had upon them an awe and fear, as Jacob at Bethel, or Eliphaz in the night visions, or as the apostles when they thought they had seen the spirit, and knew not that it was Jesus. They could almost pray Him to depart from them, or to hide His awefulness. They found it easier to obey than to suffer--to do than to give up--to bear the cross than to hang upon it: but they cannot go back, for they have come too near the unseen cross, and its virtues have pierced too deeply within them. He is fulfilling to them his promise, "And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.
But now, at last, their turn is come. Before, they had only hear ~ Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

Learning to wear a mask (that word already embedded in the term "masculinity") is the first lesson in patriarchal masculinity that a boy learns. He learns that his core feelings cannot be expressed if they do not conform to the acceptable behaviors sexism defines as male. Asked to give up the true self in order to realize the patriarchal ideal, boys learn self-betrayal early and are rewarded for these acts of soul murder. ~ Bell Hooks

Self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment. ~ Maxwell Maltz

Start a daily routine of looking at yourself in the mirror through a lens of unconditional love, appreciation, admiration and respect....Connect with the soul behind the image of you in the mirror. Look upon yourself with complete adoration, acceptance and non- judgement. ~ Miya Yamanouchi

We erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves - idealised, you know, but still recognisable - and then spend our lives engaged in the effort to make ourselves into its likeness. ~ John Banville

The first step on the journey of faith is to recognize that everything is moving onward to something else, inside us and outside ... We see that a self-image we've been holding doesn't need to define us forever, the next step is not the last step, what life was is not what it is now, and certainly not what it might yet be. ~ Sharon Salzberg

It is funny how different mirrors reveal different aspects, it must be like people you meet, you get to prefer the ones who show an image of you that you like. ~ Alain Bremond-Torrent

Of all the emotional relationships in life, is there any more delicate, more noble, and more intense than a boy's deep and yet so totally bashful love for another boy? The kind of love that never speaks, never dares give way to a caress, a glance, or a word, the kind of vigilant love that bitterly grieves over every shortcoming or imperfection in the one who is loved, a love which is longing and admiration and negation of self, and which is pride and humility and calmly breathing happiness. ~ Jens Peter Jacobsen

Every time I rap about being a big girl in a small world, it's doing a couple things: it's empowering my self-awareness, my body image, and it's also making the statement that we are all bigger than this; we're a part of something bigger than this, and we should live in each moment knowing that. ~ Lizzo

I used to refer to myself as a 'theoretical anorexic,' just as crazy when it came to body image, but saved by a lack of self-discipline. My daughters do everything better than I do - they're smarter, more beautiful, happier. What if they end up better at anorexia, too? ~ Ayelet Waldman

I always felt sorry for humans, spending so much time in front of the mirror. Fixing their hair, makeup, and clothes, mostly to impress others. Did they really see themselves in the mirror? Was it what they wanted to see? Did it make them feel good or bad? And mostly I wondered if they based their self-image on their reflected one. ~ Ellen Schreiber

I look in the mirror and see myself,
and yet I really don't.
Only an image is perceived,
not things I will or things I won't.

Ideas in my mind I cannot see.
No glimpse of how I feel.
Shreds of emotion shape my gaze,
but depth, the mirror will not reveal.

I see my reflection colored in,
my hair, my skin, my eyes.
Hues in my heart and shades of thought
remain unlit by fire or skies.

I smile at the mirror and watch it grin,
hasty to copy me,
but who I am 'twill never know.
Mirrors don't reflect identities. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich