Inferiority Quotes

“The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.”
― Plato, The Republic

“What is a genius? A person who demands little to nothing from others, but is often found extremely difficult to have around.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Simply minding one's own business is more offensive than being intrusive. Without ever saying a word one can make a person feel less-than.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The barrier during self-improvement is not so much that we hate learning, rather we hate being taught. To learn entails that the knowledge was achieved on one's own accord - it feels great - but to be taught often leaves a feeling of inferiority. Thus it takes a bit of determination and a lot of humility in order for one to fully develop.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“The moment of crisis had come, and I must face it. My old fears, my diffidence, my shyness, my hopeless sense of inferiority, must be conquered now and thrust aside. If I failed now I should fail forever.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization. In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“No: I shall not marry Samuel Fawthrop Wynne."

"I ask why? I must have a reason. In all respects he is more than worthy of you."

She stood on the hearth; she was pale as the white marble slab and cornice behind her; her eyes flashed large, dilated, unsmiling.

"And I ask in what sense that young man is worthy of me?”
― Charlotte Brontë, Shirley

“It's such a shame that we know so little about our own country, that we can't find it in our hearts to love our own kind. Instead we admire those who show our country disrespect and betray its people.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Snow

“The logic behind patriotism is a mystery. At least a man who believes that his own family or clan is superior to all others is familiar with more than 0.000003% of the people involved.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Envy suggests inferiority.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Overconfidence blurs out the risk. Inferiority magnifies it.”
― Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident], Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beating and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for their are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior: official censors, judges and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“This is God's universe and he is the master gardener of all. If we were to eliminate all colors in his garden,then what would be a rainbow with only one color? Or a garden with only one kind of flower? Why would the Creator create a vast assortment of plants, ethnicities, and animals, if only one beast or seed is to dominate all of existence?”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“We must interpret a bad temper as a sign of inferiority.”
― Alfred Adler

“The Scholars
"Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;
Wear out the carpet with their shoes
Earning respect; have no strange friend;
If they have sinned nobody knows.
Lord, what would they say
Should their Catullus walk that way?”
― W.B. Yeats, The Wild Swans At Coole

“Give me something about bacteria. Give me something that won't make me feel so inferior”
― William Saroyan

“We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones -- those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.”
― Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

“That's just your persecution complex talking. Maybe you feel like I'm looking down on you because you're simply conscious of your own inferiority?”
― Wataru Watari, やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている。4

“The girl's life had been squandered in the streets, and among the most noisome of the stews and dens of London, but there was something of the woman's original nature left in her still; and when she heard a light step approaching the door opposite to that by which she had entered, and thought of the wide contrast which the small room would in another moment contain, she felt burdened with the sense of her own deep shame: and shrunk as though she could scarcely bear the presence of her with whom she had sought this interview.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“I felt so ashamed with them because everything in their life was going so well and they were so sort of successful. I couldn't talk about what I wanted with them and they were always in a hurry.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“We are always ready to look down on people: it is an abiding pleasure, a poultice for our own sore sense of inferiority.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Mouthful of Air: Languages and Language, Especially English

“It [anger] presents itself as a huge umbrella that shields other emotions such as frustration, confusion, embarrassment, lack, insecurity, inferiority, violation, resentment, sadness, and guilt. There is always a root to the real issue that you are too afraid to step into a vulnerable space and address.”
― Robin S. Baker, Esotericism With an Unconventional Soul: Exploring Philosophy, Spirituality, Science, and Mysticism

“Deficits are defeated by the strength that we gain in fighting them.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The deficits in our life only survive if we grant them permission to be the lie that allows them to be deficits.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough