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When money and fame happen too late, it's like pouring kerosene over a fire of self-loathing.
Sep 10, 2025
I think people are used to people in show business having a lot of hubris. I think I have a normal amount of self-loathing but because I'm in show business it's considered self-deprecation. In normal life I would just be considered your average neurotic.
To be longing for this thing to-day and for that thing to-morrow; to change likings for loathings, and to stand wishing and hankering at a venture--how is it possible for any man to be at rest in this fluctuant, wandering humor and opinion?
There's only so many movies you can do. I start to get really self-loathing and sick of myself. And I think in order to act, you need to live a little bit to fill yourself with experience.
Self-loathing is the silent hemorrhaging of the soul. You don't feel or see the life force fleeing until it's not longer there, and then, of course, it's too late.
Socialism is, among other things, the political habitat of low self-esteem, incompetence, self-loathing, and a willingness to steal - or have stolen for you what you are unable or unwilling to work for. Socialism is a philosophy fit only for slugs, leaches, and mosquitoes.
Music is so therapeutic for me that if I can't get it out, I start feeling bad about myself - a lot of self-loathing.
The 2 extremes, neither one worse than the other: the result of bad religion is self-loathing and violence; the result of bad spirituality is self-worship and narcissism.
I have this thing about my own voice on record. No matter what I sing, it sounds really serious, and I sound self loathing or whatever, which was just driving me nuts because that's not what I was writing.
I managed to reach a depth of self-loathing that usually takes a night of drinking to achieve.
Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the thousand flowers of his soul. What does not stand classified as either man or wolf he does not see at all.
I think having a good life prompts it... anybody who has a good life and looks around them sees the enormous disparity that exists in the world between those people who do and those that don't. I can't say we walk about our guilt a lot, though. If we do, it probably comes out in the form of self-loathing jokes. But it's a tough thing to wrap your head around... the have's and have not's in the world.
Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one's self-respect. For jealous people, like dope-fiends, stoop to the lowest level and in the end inspire only disgust and loathing.
["Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas"] is a very hard book to translate to film because there's so much interior monologue. The what if factor. I tried to write it cinematically and let the dialogue carry it but I forgot about the interior monologue. It's kind of hard to show what's going on in the head. I think we should do it like a documentary.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.
Washington, under Democrats and Republicans, has a profoundly neurotic attitude toward 'the people.' It is built on equal parts of suspicion, loathing, fear, respect and dependence.
There's no cure for getting depressed. There's no cure for self-loathing or periods of it. But figure out enough about it so that when it happens, you can get over it and keep moving and just accomplish more.
No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.
They [leftists] want to eliminate the concept of winners and losers. They want to wipe out the fact that there are any differences, particularly outcome differences, from one person to another. The things that they seek are not possible. The things that they seek are rooted in self-loathing, misery, unhappiness, crankiness, whatever.
The loathing of mankind is a force that surprises and overwhelms one, fed by hundreds of springs concealed his subconsciousness. One only detects its presence after having long entertained it unawares.
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
Mediocrity cherishes rules; as for me, I hate them; I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.
We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, God permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame. The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is lest we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing, with consequent repentance and humility.
The Internet, I'm trying to point out, is a kooks' paradise. Anybody with a keyboard and a modem can spread fear, loathing, and just plain asinine ideas among hundreds of thousands of people with the click of a button. Discouraging, but true.
Through the process of specifically writing this memoir, there was so much reckoning that I had to do. It was very difficult. It doesn't erase anything that happened, but I think that it was healthy for me to do it. The teenage self-loathing that I suffered from all of a sudden found itself turned into rapids with my grief after my brother died. I turned it inwards. In the same way that my mom processes her grief and her problems. This project, as a memoir, has helped me funnel it outwards.
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.
Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.
The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal -- God is the Omnipotent Father -- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.
I don't trust anyone who hasn't been self-destructiv e in some way, and who hasn't gone through some sort of bout of self-loathing. You've got to bang yourself around a bit to know yourself.
It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.
Stop being astounded by the realization that sex is the object of such misunderstanding and of such automatic clumsiness that it implies either a universal loathing or a universal veneration (which are much the same thing).
The word 'phobic' has its place when properly used, but lately it's been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing.
Certain people give off positive energy, others negative. It's the quality of someone's being, a measure of the love with which they've led their lives. It also reflects the inner work they've done, their efforts to heal anger, hatred, or self-loathing, which poison us like toxic fumes.
I am apt to think, if we knew what it was to be an angel for one hour, we should return to this world, though it were to sit on the brightest throne in it, with vastly more loathing and reluctance than we would now descend into a loathsome dungeon or sepulchre.
My devils and angels, fears and hopes, insights and stupidities, loves and loathings, are what they are. I don't edit them out so much as try to make them interesting - whether I am talking to you, or writing a poem, or joking with my kids, or speaking on television.
If the impure and the unjust, the drunkard and the licentious, are loathsome to us, what must be the infinite loathing of an infinitely pure Spirit for those who are worldly and selfish, licentious and cruel, ambitious and animal! But with this great loathing is a great pity. And the pity conquers the loathing, appeases it, satisfies it, is reconciled with it, only as it redeems the sinner from his loathsomeness, lifts him up from his degradation, brings him to truth and purity, to love and righteousness; for only thus is he or can he be brought to God.
To appear unambitious amongst the ambitious is to invite loathing or fear. To be in the game, but not playing with intent to win, is to be the enemy.
Like a lot of people, I've got a self-loathing streak that's alive and well. It acts as a de facto engine when I'm working, but it also has its extraordinary pitfalls, too.
It's been said that alcoholics are egomaniacs with low self -esteem. It's the prefect description. Being larger than life and yet your pride is crushed with self- loathing.
Good people drink good beer.
All my life I have battled the alarm clock, pummeling the snooze button over and over with mounting self-loathing until the shame is finally strong enough to lever me upright.
Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain. I love you still among these cold things. Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels that cross the sea towards no arrival. I see myself forgotten like those old anchors. The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there. My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose. I love what I do not have. You are so far. My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights. But night comes and starts to sing to me.
In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst.
To the pessimist the light at the end of the tunnel is another train.
Seems like the light at the end of the tunnel may be you.
Narcissism is actually a clever guise adopted to mask its exact opposite, which is a deep well of self-loathing, a well of low self-esteem, rather than high self-esteem. This helps explain why narcissists are so sensitive to criticism, why narcissists tend to break into outrage if they're criticized, because their self-esteem is actually much more brittle than it seems, and once they're challenged, that mask falls apart.
Actually, the curious thing is that the more you become a subject of admiration or loathing, the more you're examined under a microscope, the distance seems to open up between who you really are and the portrayals that people impose on you.
There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.
But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.
The gospel shows us that our spiritual problem lies not only in failing to obey God, but also in relying on our obedience to make us fully acceptable to God, ourselves and others. Every kind of character flaw comes from this natural impulse to be our own saviour through our own performance and achievement. On the one hand, proud and disdainful personalities come from basing your identity on your performance and thinking you are succeeding. But on the other hand, discouraged and self loathing personalities also come from basing your identity on your performance and thinking you are failing.