Narcissists With Quotes & Sayings

Learning to spot narcissists and deal with their destructive behavior can save you the world of hurt that awaits anyone who mistakes the near enemy for a friend. — Martha Beck

I find that the crazy narcissists, the selfish loons are often the most fun to be around, weirdly. — Paul Giamatti

Narcissism falls along the axis of what psychologists call personality disorders, one of a group that includes antisocial, dependent, histrionic, avoidant and borderline personalities. But by most measures, narcissism is one of the worst, if only because the narcissists themselves are so clueless. — Jeffrey Kluger

Narcissism is as profitable to a model as scruffiness is to a homeless person. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Sociopaths have no conscience. Narcissists have no empathy. Neither one thinks other people are real. Narcissists think other people are just ego food, tools or extensions of themselves. — Koren Zailckas

Cats are the ultimate narcissists. You can tell this because of all the time they spend on personal grooming. Dogs aren't like this. dog's idea of personal grooming is to roll in a dead fish. — James P. Gorman

A lot of artists are such narcissists. — Kristen Stewart

The most uninteresting thing in the world is watching narcissists fuck each other. — Jarett Kobek

Playing the victim role: Manipulator portrays him- or herself as a victim of circumstance or of someone else's behavior in order to gain pity, sympathy or evoke compassion and thereby get something from another. Caring and conscientious people cannot stand to see anyone suffering and the manipulator often finds it easy to play on sympathy to get cooperation. — George K. Simon

Muhammad was a narcissist and Muslims, by having entered into his bubble universe have become narcissists by extension. More precisely, they are reverse narcissists. A commonly used term for reverse narcissist is co-dependent. — Ali Sina

Relationships with narcissists are held in place by hope
of a "someday better," with little evidence to support it will ever arrive. — Ramani Durvasula

pretend to feel emotions that they don't actually feel, as well as pretend they don't feel ones that they actually do. They often believe that they only have two options in life: to be completely alone or to entirely give themselves up in a relationship. These children are often depressed, have anger that they may not be aware of, and feelings of emptiness inside of them. Often, they attract addicts, narcissists and other emotionally unavailable partners to them, which allows them to continually repeat the emotional abandonment they experienced in childhood. Although this is damaging to them, it provides a minor sense of comfort, as it fulfills their need to be codependent. In — Emily Parker

Odds are you know some narcissists. Odds are they're smart, confident and articulate. They make you laugh, they make you think; the first time you met, they probably charmed the pants off of you - perhaps even literally. The odds are also that that spell didn't last. — Jeffrey Kluger

There are athletes and celebrities that are out there and they Twitter and they constantly try to drum up press because they're narcissists. — Geoff Stults

Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists. — Cornel West

You will never get the truth out of a Narcissist. The closest you will ever come is a story that either makes them the victim or the hero, but never the villain. — Shannon L. Alder

Ours has become a world where a tragic number of people are more fascinated by materialism and the lives of distant narcissists than by their own life experience. — Brendon Burchard

There's a reason narcissists don't learn from mistakes and that's because they never get past the first step which is admitting that they made one. It's always an assistant's fault, an adviser's fault, a lawyer's fault. Ask them to account for a mistake any other way and they'll say, 'what mistake? — Jeffrey Kluger

Narcissists will never tell you the truth. They live with the fear of abandonment and can't deal with facing their own shame. Therefore, they will twist the truth, downplay their behavior, blame others and say what ever it takes to remain the victim. They are master manipulators and conartists that don't believe you are smart enough to figure out the depth of their disloyalty. Their needs will always be more important than telling you any truth that isn't in their favor.. — Shannon L. Alder

I want to prove a point. That point is, actors are artists, not narcissists necessarily. — William Hurt

People accuse artists of being narcissists - of course we are! If we don't like ourselves, who's going to like us? — Yoko Ono

Regrets? I think everyone has regrets, and people who say they haven't are either liars ... or narcissists. — Lee Radziwill

Love is not a contract between two narcissists. — Alain Badiou

In their secretly nervous hearts, they've convinced themselves, poor little delusional narcissists, that their nation is the most powerful that ever was or even will be, ignoring the still vaster empires that have crumbled in the past, conveniently forgetting that the U.S. has only existed for a mere 225 years, and refusing to consider for a nanosecond that in another 225 years it very well might be gone.
*Stubblefield commentary, on patriotic American citizens in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. — Tom Robbins

Jerk equals narcissist.Narcissists tend to be risk takers. Risk takers happen to do better in general in businesses. So jerk equals narcissist, equals risk taker. — Eric Bolling

The mythological Narcissus rejected the advances of the nymph Echo and was punished by the goddess Nemesis. He was consigned to pine away as he fell in love with his own reflection - exactly as Echo had pined away for him. How apt. Narcissists are punished by echoes and reflections of their problematic personalities up to this very day.
Narcissists are said to be in love with themselves.
But this is a fallacy. Narcissus is not in love with himself. He is in love with his reflection.
There is a major difference between one's True Self and reflected-self. — Sam Vaknin

Hate is the complement of fear and narcissists like being feared. It imbues them with an intoxicating sensation of omnipotence. — Sam Vaknin

Narcissists (and often, by contagion, their unfortunate victims) don't talk, or communicate: they fend off, hide and evade . . . [They] perfect the ability of saying nothing in lengthy Castro-like speeches. Their locution is impregnated with first person pronouns ("I", "me", "my", "mine" - aka "high pronoun density").

The ensuing convoluted sentences are .. a lack of commitment elevated to an ideology. The narcissist prefers to wait and see what procrastination brings: postponement of the inevitable leads to the inevitability of postponement as a strategy of survival. — Sam Vaknin

The romance that has surrounded the Beat generation since the mid-Sixties has acted as a kind of sentimental glaze, obscuring its fundamentally nihilistic impulse under a heap of bogus rhetoric about liberation, spontaneity, and 'startling oases of creativity', Notwithstanding their recent media media make-over, the Beats were not Promethean iconoclasts. They were drug-abusing sexual predators and infantilized narcissists whose shamelessness helped dupe a confused and gullible public into believing that their utterances were works of genius. We have to thank Lisa Phillips and the Whitney for inadvertently reminding us of this with such vividness. If nothing else, 'Beat Culture and the New America' showed that the Beats were not simply artistic charlatans; the were -- and, in the case of those who are still with us, they remain -- moral simpletons, whose destructive influence helped fuel the cultural catastrophe with which we are now living. — Roger Kimball

Now we've got an entire generation of fucked-up narcissists 'cause their mamas told them they're special. — Mark Gimenez

She realized in an instant that being around him awakened her, stirring the sediment that had long ago settled at the bottom of her well. He made her feel a part of him, of something larger, and somehow more alive. — Luna Saint Claire

Narcissists commonly cut people off and out of their lives due to their shallow emotional style of seeing others as either good or bad. — Karyl McBride

It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most. — David Brooks

Narcissists ... have the least sense of self of anybody on the planet. — Anna C. Salter

There's nothing more narcissistic than being sure that you are built in the image of an all-powerful Creator-God, and that same God answers your prayers, knows your name, and has a personal relationship with you. — David G. McAfee

Criminally negligent narcissists, child endangerers, child abusers, religious maniacs, and kleptoparasites, meaning they stole from their own descendants. These things happen. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Narcissists are neither carefree nor innocent. They have learned to play the power game, to seduce and to manipulate. They are always thinking about how people see and respond to them. And they must stay in control because loss of control evokes their fear of insanity. — Alexander Lowen

What narcissists and sociopaths will do is construct a false apology, in order to pacify dissent and further evade detection. This is usually delivered snidely, with a subtext of blaming the victim for their own actions, whatever they are. — William Lockhart

Siren Servers are narcissists; blind to where value comes from, including the web of global interdependence that is at the core of their own value. — Jaron Lanier

Narcissism isn't vanity, Anna. We're all narcissists to a degree. A measure of narcissism is healthy. But out of balance, what was once appropriate self-confidence becomes grandiose, pathological, and destructive. You have little regard for those around you. You do what you will with a libertine's abandon. Boredom sets in. A bored woman is a dangerous woman. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

For example, unlike the Left, those who value wisdom know that when you give people something for nothing, you produce ungrateful people; that when you obscure the differences between men and women, you end up with many aimless men and angry women; that when you give children "self-esteem" without their earning it, you produce narcissists who enter adulthood often incapable of empathy and of handling life; that if you do not destroy evil, it will proliferate; and that if you are kind to the cruel, you will end up being cruel to the kind. — Dennis Prager

Some people seem to have a black belt in selfishness ... ninja narcissists with no regard to how they impact those around them ... but at the same time, a master at the art of playing victim. — Steve Maraboli

Since [narcissists] deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil, on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others. — M. Scott Peck

Though they are quick to put others down, unhealthy narcissists view themselves in absolutely positive terms. They — Daniel Goleman

Our public figures are often narcissists, utterly self-absorbed in their quest for power. — Nicholas Kristof

It's the narcissist's way of maintaining control of the twisted situation he conducted in his environment.
Narcissists thrive when attempting to make people crazy. It's called psychological warfare. — V. Theia

I love narcissists-even more than they love themselves. You don't have to buoy them up. They are their own razzle-dazzle show and you are the blessed, favored with a front-row seat. — Patricia Marx

Truthfully, there're only a handful of people in this world who really get joy from seeing you happy. Most won't care if you're happy, only if you're miserable like they are. They eat that shit up. — Crystal Woods

A sociopath is one who sees others as impersonal objects to be manipulated to fulfill their own narcissistic needs without any regard for the hurtful consequences of their selfish actions. — R. Alan Woods

Narcissists do not choose us because we are like them; they choose us because we are the light to their darkness; regardless of any of our vulnerabilities, we exhibit the gorgeous traits of empathy, compassion, emotional intelligence and authentic confidence that their fragile egotism and false mask could never achieve. — Shahida Arabi

The world is so rife with narcissists that none of them take enough notice of me. — Eleanor Bron

Nobody enjoys being on display," said Isabel. But then she thought: Some do, and so she added, "Except actors. And narcissists. — Alexander McCall Smith

Narcissists are everywhere in this ripe age of self-love, which amazes me because so much in life would seem to foster humility. Each of us is a potential source of foolishness, each of us must endure the consequences of the foolishness of others, and in addition to all of that, Nature frequently works to impress upon us our absurdity and thereby remind us that we are not the masters of the universe that we like to suppose we are. - Odd Thomas - Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz pg 62 chapter 8 — Dean Koontz

Love without sacrifice is like theft — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Ingratitude' is the name which avatars of Narcissus give to the success of others. — Jean Lorrain

Bezos personifies a new breed of executive that arose with the emergence of the game-changing technologies in the 1980s and 1990s ... a 'productive narcissist' ... These executives have big enough egos to make up seemingly random rules of business leadership. However, unlike other narcissists, they get the job done. — Richard L. Brandt

Fire, ice, asteroids and pole shifts are bogeymen with which we distract ourselves from the real threat of our time. In an age when everyone invents his own truth, there is no community, only factions. Without community, there can be no consensus to resist the greedy, the envious, the power-mad narcissists who seize control and turn the institutions of civilization into a series of doom machines. — Dean Koontz

Poetry invades loneliness in a way that nothing else can. I thought that if I changed that people, beautiful people, arrogant people, narcissists, intellectuals, readers, teachers, spiritual gurus would come into my life but they did not. I am still rowing my boat ashore. It still feels like Hiroshima out there. — Abigail George

I think politicians and comedians have a lot in common. One is a group of approval-seeking narcissists who will say and do anything to be liked ... and comedians are always talking about politics. — Aasif Mandvi

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people. — Jonathan Franzen

Often the narcissist believes that other people are "faking it", leveraging emotional displays to achieve a goal. He is convinced that their ostensible "feelings" are grounded in ulterior, non-emotional motives. Faced with other people's genuine emotions, the narcissist becomes suspicious and embarrassed. He feels compelled to avoid emotion-tinged situations, or worse, experiences surges of almost uncontrollable aggression in the presence of expressed sentiments. They remind him how imperfect he is and how poorly equipped. — Sam Vaknin

Narcissists gaslight you so you begin to gaslight yourself into thinking what you are feeling, hearing, seeing and experiencing isn't true. A narcissistic partner can manipulate you into thinking that perhaps that hurtful comment really was just a joke and that their infidelity was just a one-time thing. Many of these partners engage in pathological lying and rewrite reality on a daily basis to suit their needs and to conceal their manipulative agenda. — Shahida Arabi

so often victims end up unnecessarily prolonging their abuse because they buy into the notion that their abuser must be coming from a wounded place and that only patient love and tolerance (and lots of misguided therapy) will help them heal. — George K. Simon

But it would be broadcast, and in the great public theatre of his age; that unregulated market of braying narcissists, that Wild West of disinformation and fraud, that infinite sea of piracy, the great electorate where the constituency of billions voted their approval with a click of a mouse. The internet. It brought governments down and rewrote history ... — Adam Nevill

If anybody studying psychology wants a concrete example of what a narcissist looks like, I advise them to consider any man who cheats on his wife. These guys are the textbook me-firsters, the ones who think the rules don't apply to them, the ones who tell themselves as long as she doesn't know, there's no harm done. No woman needs to sleep with these guys. There are so many single self-absorbed narcissists who will fuck you poorly. — Julie Klausner

People lie for many reasons: to save themselves, to get out of trouble, to avoid hurting someone's feelings. Manipulators lie to get what they want. Narcissists lie to make themselves seem grand to others and themselves. Recovering alcoholics lie to safeguard their tattered reputation. And those who love us most lie to us most of all, because life is a bumpy ride and they want to smooth it out as much as possible. — Ilona Andrews

God doesn't ordain stupidity. — Shannon L. Alder

In a world of selfie-addiction smile usually is the brand name for an essential drug called pretense — Munia Khan

Narcissism is very much a "disorder of superficiality." Given that the entire world is trending towards greater superficiality in all endeavors - work, school, parenting, and love - the narcissists' propensity toward superficiality no longer seems that unusual. — Ramani Durvasula

Narcissists have poor self-esteem, but they are typically very successful. They feel entitled; they're self-important; they crave admiration and lack empathy. They are also exploitative and envious. The malignant types never forget a slight. They may kill you ten years later for cutting them off in traffic. But they act perfectly normal while plotting their revenge. — Janet M. Tavakoli

I think narcissists are endlessly watchable. The way they view the world and the way they interact within the world. — Michael Showalter

Narcissists are consumed with maintaining a shallow false self to others. They're emotionally crippled souls that are addicted to attention. Because of this they use a multitude of games, in order to receive adoration. Sadly, they are the most ungodly of God's creations because they don't show remorse for their actions, take steps to make amends or have empathy for others. They are morally bankrupt. — Shannon L. Alder

Don't ever believe that Narcissists don't understand they have hurt you. They know exactly what they did and why they did it. The reason they can't stop their abuse is because the narcissistic supply is their addiction. Unlike, drug addicts that need their fix to feel normal, narcissists need to feel significant. This is their addiction. Even if it takes destructive ways to have this emotional balance they will pursue it. Your feelings don't count only the supply does. The greater the supply the greater the drama in your life as they pursue it. So, get over believing they don't understand. They do understand. You just found out and got in the way of their easy access to greater supply than you. — Shannon L. Alder

Because their shame is so much deeper and more agonizing, Extreme Narcissists will stop at nothing to avoid feeling it. In fact, almost everything they say and do is intended to avoid the experience of shame. The narcissistic defenses they mobilize against shame are so extreme and pervasive that they color everything about the person's personality, relationships, and behavior, creating a kind of shell or armor against the threat of shame. — Joseph Burgo

The paradox is that no love can prove so intense
as the love of two narcissists for each other. — Norman Mailer

Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Covert narcissists blind you with their saccharine sweetness: they present the perfect public image, routinely go on their knees to pray, say their mantras on their yoga mats, preach 'peace and compassion,' all the while plotting on how to best stab you in the back. In some ways, covert narcissists are worse than overt ones. At least overt ones are open about how awful they really are. — Shahida Arabi

A man who leaves his wife is also a kind of immigrant. He rejects the home he's always known for another. Is it a surprise that Americans have the highest divorce rate in the world? If ditched lovers are also counted, then our rate of betrayal becomes truly stratospheric. To start over and advance or save ourselves, if only in our minds, we're willing to destroy everything. Soaked in a depthless, sampling culture, we're also expert at forgetting. Not only do we have no historical memory, but our personal past can be willfully and instantly erased, with hardly a ripple in its wake, and there's no one around, no community, to remind us of our shames. Extreme narcissists, we cling to bizarre narratives that allow us to make the most preposterous statements without flinching, or indulge in the most perverse and damaging behaviors. — Linh Dinh

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. — Matt Taibbi

As a pastor, I recognize that in theological terms, narcissists want to be the center of attention, like a god, and have people worship them by paying attention to them, buying the products they promote, and emulating their behavior. — Mark Driscoll

Realize that narcissists have an addiction disorder. They are strongly addicted to feeling significant. Like any addict they will do whatever it takes to get this feeling often. That is why they are manipulative and future fakers. They promise change, but can't deliver if it interferes with their addiction. That is why they secure back up supply. — Shannon L. Alder

UNREALITY IS THE HALLMARK of narcissism. Whether it's idealizations, expectations of perfection, manufactured images, illusions, distortions of fact, catastrophizing or other kinds of exaggerations, denial, or outright lying, Narcissists will go to great lengths to avoid any reality that evokes shame and to promote fanatasies that sustain their grandiosity and omnipotence. They require accomplices for this, people to admire them and do their bidding, — Sandy Hotchkiss

Children happen to be more attached to the female narcissist due to the way our society is still structured and to the fact that women are the ones to give birth and to serve as primary caretakers. It is much easier for a woman to think of her children as her extensions because they once indeed were her physical extensions and because her on-going interaction with them is both more intensive and more extensive.
[The] male narcissist is more likely to regard his children as a nuisance than as a Source of Narcissistic Supply - especially as they grow older and become autonomous.
With less alternatives than men, the narcissistic woman fights to maintain her most reliable Source of Supply: her children. Through insidious indoctrination, guilt-formation, emotional sanctions and blackmail, deprivation and other psychological mechanisms, she tries to induce in her offspring dependence which cannot easily be unraveled. — Sam Vaknin

His fame as an artist requires very tender care. Look what a mask of diplomacy is painstakingly formed by the whole of that fine profile; he is as wily as a cardinal. He has scented in Miss White a useful agent of celebrity, and he has come solely to harness her to the cause of his glory. It is himself that he courts by means of the salaams he offers to her; he only ever flirts with himself. He is the Narcissus of the inkpot ... — Jean Lorrain

To declare myself as a genius immediately evidences that I am not. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing — Nassim Nicholas Taleb