Quotes & Sayings About Worthlessness

I think closeness to death would be pretty exhilarating in a way, and friendship, yeh, and selflessness, a kind of selflessness, a sense of your own worthlessness, I think, is pretty exhilarating. — Sebastian Faulks

Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz's Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. Depressives in grim situations handed down their genes, however despairingly, while the self-improvers converted to Christianity or moved away to sunnier locales. — Jonathan Franzen

People cannot endure inexplicable worthlessness — John D. MacDonald

We loathe worthlessness, and for good reason. We have a primal sense that we exist for something better and, indeed, we do. We are created in the King's image and created to be with him. But there is a reason we oppose worthlessness that is much darker: we want worth in ourselves, apart from our relationship with Jesus. When this other reason dominates, all the talk about the glory of the King and the reflected glory we experience as we are joined to him by faith is meaningless. Our hearts are searching for something else. The only solution is to turn away from putting our trust in something other than Jesus, which is actually nothing, and turn back to the Lord. It is called repentance, and it is the way to clarity and rest. — Edward T. Welch

Although claiming my true identity as a child of God, I still live as though the God to whom I am returning demands an explanation. I still think about his love as conditional and about home as a place I am not yet fully sure of. While walking home, I keep entertaining doubts about whether I will be truly welcome when I get there. As I look at my spiritual journey, my long and fatiguing trip home, I see how full it is of guilt about the past and worries about the future. I realize my failures and know that I have lost the dignity of my sonship, but I am not yet able to fully believe that where my failings are great, 'grace is always greater.' Still clinging to my sense of worthlessness, I project for myself a place far below that which belongs to the son, (p. 52). — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Father Ratti had often explained, in Religious Knowledge class, that true humility did not mean a sense of worthlessness or the kind of timidity that caused some people to be cheated and bullied all their lives. The virtue of humility, Ratti said, was merely the faculty of intelligence operating properly "The man of wisdom," Ratti explained once, "fears only one man on earth. Do you know who that is?" And when everybody guessed wrong - some said the Pope, some said King Ferdinand - Ratti said, "The man of wisdom fears himself. He knows who it is who tells him the most plausible lies, the lies he wants to believe. — Robert Anton Wilson

Toxic shame, the shame that binds us, is experienced as the all-pervasive sense that "I am flawed and defective as a human being." Toxic shame is no longer an emotion that signals our limits; it is a state of being, a core identity. Toxic shame gives you a sense of worthlessness, a sense of failing and falling short as a human being. Toxic shame is a rupture of the self with the self. It is like internal bleeding - exposure to oneself lies at the heart of toxic shame. A shame-based person will guard against exposing his inner self to others, but more significantly, he will guard against exposing himself to himself. Toxic shame is so excruciating because it is the painful exposure of the perceived failure of self to the self. In toxic shame the self becomes an object of its own contempt, an object that can't be trusted. As an object that can't be trusted, one experiences oneself as untrustworthy. — John Bradshaw

Sometimes we self-sabotage just when things seem to be going smoothly. Perhaps this is a way to express our fear about whether it is okay for us to have a better life. We are bound to feel anxious as we leave behind old notions of our unworthiness. The challenge is not to be fearless, but to develop strategies of acknowledging our fears and finding out how we can allay them. — Maureen Brady

You did not do so badly for something worthless,' he said to his left hand. 'But there was a moment where I could not find you. — Ernest Hemingway,

The function of high school, then, is not so much to communicate knowledge as to oblige children finally to accept the grading system as a measure of their inner excellence. And a function of the self-destructive process in American children is to make them willing to accept not their own, but a variety of other standards, like a grading system, for measuring themselves. It is thus apparent that the way American culture is now integrated it would fall apart if it did not engender feelings of inferiority and worthlessness. — Jules Henry

Condemning ourselves is the quickest way to get a substitute sense of worth. People who have almost, but not quite, lost their feeling of worth generally have very strong needs to condemn themselves, for that is the most ready way of drowning the bitter ache of feelings of worthlessness and humiliation. It is as though the person were saying to himself, "I must be important that I am so worth condemning," or "Look how noble I am: I have such high ideals and I am so ashamed of myself that I fall short." A psychoanalyst once pointedly remarked that when someone in psychoanalysis berates himself at great length for picayune sins, he feels like asking, "Who do you think you are?" The self-condemning person is very often trying to show how important he is that God is so concerned with punishing him. — Rollo May

The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides. — Donna Tartt

Genuine contempt, on the other hand, is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another. — Arthur Schopenhauer

How did Kirchmann understand the worthlessness of jurisprudence ? The answer lies in the aphorism: "Three revisions by the legislator and whole libraries became wastepaper." With a sharp alteration this answer became a slogan:"A stroke of the legislator's pen and whole libraries became wastepaper." Another aphorism in the same vein made the point even more brusquely and less politely: "Positive law turns the jurist into a worm in rotten wood." Kirchmann meant that jurisprudence could never catch up with legislation. Thus our predicament becomes immediately obvious. What remains of a science reduced to annotating and interpreting constantly changing regulations issued by state agencies presumed to be in the best position to know and articulate their true intent? — Carl Schmitt

The opinions of the misanthropical rest upon this very partial basis, that they adopt the bad faith of a few as evidence of the worthlessness of all. — Christian Nestell Bovee

The trick to flying safely, Zoe always said, was to never buy a discount ticket and to tell yourself you had nothing to live for anyway, so that when the plane crashed it was no big deal. Then, when it didn't crash, when you had succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living. — Lorrie Moore

Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear. — William Congreve

I am not fair save to the King, Though fair my royal dress, His kingly grace is lavished on My need and worthlessness. My blemishes he will not see But loves the beauty that shall be. — Hannah Hurnard

O my Charlotte, the sacred, tender remembrance! Gracious Heaven! restore to me the happy moment of our first acquaintance.
I smile at the suggestions of my heart, and obey its dictates.
their hearts do not beat in unison
I turned my face away. She should not act thus. She ought not to excite my imagination with such displays of heavenly innocence and happiness, nor awaken my heart from its slumbers, in which it dreams of the worthlessness of life! And why not? Because she knows how much I love her.
I possess so much, but my love for her absorbs it all. I possess so much, but without her I have nothing.
My dear friend, my energies are all prostrated: she can do with me what she pleases. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Theory and knowledge remain suspect, not because of inherent worthlessness, but because of their historic isolation from action. Without theoretical orientation, however, action is vulnerable to oversimplified and glib imitativeness-even mimicry-and to the use of the gimmick. — Erving Polster

Most people in the grip of depression at its ghastliest are, for whatever reason, in a state of unrealistic hopelessness, torn by exaggerated ills and fatal threats that bear no resemblance to actuality. It may require on the part of friends, lovers, family, admirers, an almost religious devotion to persuade the sufferers of life's worth, which is so often in conflict with a sense of their own worthlessness, but such devotion has prevented countless suicides. — William Styron

The voices woke Amy, and, lying in her bed, she perceived vaguely the pitiful corruption of the adult world; how crude and frail it was, like a piece of worn burlap, patched with stupidities and mistakes, useless and ugly, and yet they never saw its worthlessness, and when you pointed it out to them, they were indignant. — John Cheever

I felt that even the sun belonged to my father, that I had no right to it because it was shining upon my father's house. I was like his roses, something that belonged to him and not to me. — Charles Bukowski

A man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him... By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign... We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them... but the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion. — Thomas Carlyle

We need to hear the excuses men make to themselves for their worthlessness. — Margaret Fuller

If everything on television is, without exception, part of a low-calorie (or even no-calorie) diet, then what good is it complaining about the adverts? By their worthlessness, they at least help to make the programmes around them seem of a higher level. — Jean Baudrillard

Do you know what it is to play a part? To split your personality deliberately for twenty-four hours a day? Even when with friends? Even when alone, so that you will never forget inadvertently? To be a dilettante? To be eternally amused? To be of no account? To be so effete and faintly ridiculous that you have convinced all who know you of your own worthlessness? All so that your life may be safe even though it means it has become barely worth living. But even so, once in a while I can fight them. — Isaac Asimov

Civil war tends to give a helping hand to the velocity of currency, Ukraine can attest to that. However, it is quite an unpleasant way to find the intrinsic value of worthlessness. — Tom Wallace

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the true worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul ... You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you. — Adrian Tan

In proportion as I discover the worthlessness of other pursuits, the value of my Eliza and of domestic happiness rises in my estimation. — Alexander Hamilton

The world is a dangerous place for little girls. Besides, little girls are more fragile, more delicate, more brittle than little boys. 'Watch out, be careful, watch.' 'Don't climb trees, don't dirty your dress, don't accept lifts from strange men. Listen but don't learn, you won't need it.' And so the snail's antennae grow, watching for this, looking for that, the underneath of things. The threat. And so she wastes so much of her energy, seeking to break those circuits, to push up the millions of tiny thumbs that have tried to quelch energy and creativity and strength and self-confidence; that have so effectively caused her to build fences against possibility, daring; that have so effectively kept her imprisoned inside her notions of self-worthlessness. And — Robyn Davidson

Nothing worse than a man who makes excuses, blames others, and refuses responsibility for his own actions. No doubt there were real experiences that underlined the worthlessness of excuse makers for these men. — James MacDonald

The man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises - because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him. — Ayn Rand

For mothers, some mothers, my mother, daughters are division and sons are multiplication; the former reduce them, fracture them, take from them, the latter augment and enhance. My mother, who would light up at the thought that my brothers were handsome, rankled at the idea that I might be nice-looking. The queen's envy of Snow White is deadly. It's based on the desire to be the most beautiful of all, and it raises the question of whose admiration she needs and what she thinks Snow White is competing for, this child whose beauty is an affliction. At the back of this drama between women are men, the men for whom the queen wants to be beautiful, the men whose attention is the arbiter of worth and worthlessness. — Rebecca Solnit

Evil working in subtler fashion; marriages that proved to be no more then legalized slavery, and the careful manipulation of a bright and sensitive mind until its owner truly believed with all her heart in her own worthlessness. Betrayal, not once, but many times over. — Mercedes Lackey

You are worthless to others if you don't know your own self and self-worth. — Bryant McGill

After watching what this purchase had cost Irwin and Linda, Amy and I chose a different path. Love, we figured, may be the best thing that ever happens between two people. And that the best thing is of no worldly worth struck us a beautiful paradox
and an endangered one. We therefore began fighting to defend the worthlessness of lovers everywhere in the only way we knew how: by vowing to remain as inseparable from each other, and as utterly useless to all opportunists, as the rest of our responsibilities would allow. — David James Duncan

What Music expresses is eternal, infinite, and ideal; she expresses not the passion, love, desire, of this or that individual in this or that condition, but Passion, Love, Desire itself, and in such infinitely varied phases as lie in her unique possession and are foreign and unknown to any other tongue ... So ... Here's to Victory, gained by our higher sense over the worthlessness of the vulgar! To Love, which crowns our courage ... To the day, to the night! ... And three cheers for Music ... — Richard Wagner

People hate themselves, people condemn themselves - they go on condemning; they go on thinking that they are rotten. How can the other love you, such a rotten person. No, nobody can love you really - the other must be befooling, cheating; there must be some other reason. She must be after something else; he must be after something else. You know your rottenness, worthlessness - love seems to be out of the question. And when some woman comes and says she adores you, you cannot trust. When you go to a woman and you say you adore her, and she hates herself, how can she believe you? It is self-hatred that is creating the anxiety. There — Osho

The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. — T.E. Lawrence

Excellence when concealed, differs but little from buried worthlessness.
[Lat., Paullum sepultae distat inertiae
Celata virtus.] — Horace

The world as it has very little use for your womanhood. You are considered a weaker sex and are treated as a sexual object. You are thoroughly dispensable except for bearing children. Your youth is the measure of your worth, and your age is the measure of your worthlessness. Do not look to the world for your sustenance or for your identity as a woman because you will not find them there. The world despises you. — Marianne Williamson

Tell him I write of worms and corruption, because I like worms and corruption. Tell him I believe in the fundamental wickedness and worthlessness of man, & in the rot in life. Tell him I am all for cancers. And tell him, too, that I loathe poetry. I'd prefer to be an anatomist or the keeper of a morgue any day. Tell him I live exclusively on toenails and rumours. I sleep in a coffin too, and a wormy shroud is my summer suit. — Dylan Thomas

Whatever it was her father wanted, Emma did not know how to provide it. She felt confused by what he did, and imagined the problem was a lack in her, rather than him. And there was something else:
My dad was always late when we had our meetings - i i never wanted to go in the first place, and then i'd be sitting and waiting, feeling so ugly and worthless because i wasn't worth being on time for . . .
One time when my father was late he said he fell asleep . . . I wouldn't let myself cry in front of him. — Carol Lee

Once you start rewriting, you're not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it. — Barry N. Malzberg

She could not admit but that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her. — W. Somerset Maugham

I am obsessed at nights with the idea of my own worthlessness, and if it were only to turn a light on to save my life I think I would not do it. — Virginia Woolf

Self-respect is the very cement of character, without which character will not form nor stand; a personal ideal is the only possible foundation for self-respect, without which self-respect degenerates into vanity or conceit, or is lost entirely, its place being taken by worthlessness and the consciousness of worthlessness; and that is the end of all character. It is often said that if we do not respect ourselves no one else will respect us; this is rather a dangerous way to put it; let us rather say that if we are not worthy of our own respect we cannot claim the respect of others. True self-respect is a matter of being and never of mere seeming. As Paulsen says, "It is vanity that desires first of all to be seen and admired, and then, if possible, really to be something; whereas proper self esteem desires first of all to be something, and' then, if possible, to have its worth recognized. — Edward O. Sisson

The Pacific POWs who went home in 1945 were torn-down men. They had an intimate understanding of man's vast capacity to experience suffering, as well as his equally vast capacity, and hungry willingness, to inflict it. They carried unspeakable memories of torture and humiliation, and an acute sense of vulnerability that attended the knowledge of how readily they could be disarmed and dehumanized. Many felt lonely and isolated, having endured abuses that ordinary people couldn't understand. Their dignity had been obliterated, replaced with a pervasive sense of shame and worthlessness. — Laura Hillenbrand

Children who feel unloved and unprotected are like a half-filled cup. They become incapable of 'filling up' because they have come to believe they are unworthy of love. They try to please others, give to others, and care for others in a desperate hope that they may make themselves worthy. — Beverly Engel

why do you style yourself "your worth-
less and insignificant brother"? You recognize
your insignificance? . . . Recognize it before
God; perhaps, too, in the presence of beauty, intel-
ligence, nature, but not before men. Among men
you must be conscious of your dignity. Why, you
are not a rascal, you are an honest man, aren't you?
Well, respect yourself as an honest man and know
that an honest man is not something worthless.
Don't confound "being humble" with "recognizing
one's worthlessness." . . . — Anton Chekhov

We're all just wandering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglass. — Blake Crouch

To believe that if we could have but this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness. — Eric Hoffer

You can't ever really have enough worth that when you're gone, the spot you left won't close over. — Laura Florand

It is only through contact and comparison that the relative value or worthlessness of the various cultural elements can be clearly and critically seen and understood. — Hu Shih

I mean that a battered child has a marvelous capacity to adjust to his torture and will ceaselessly love his battering parents. I mean that the mother of a sexually molested child will not leave nor truly protect the child from the father as long as the man has a good job or otherwise preserves that mother from an economic life which is more horrifying to her than the molestation of her child. I mean that the weakness of the human race is stupefying and that it's not the capacity for evil which astounds young policemen like you and me, Dean. Rather it's the mind boggling worthlessness of human beings. There's not enough dignity in mankind for evil and that's the most terrifying thing a policeman learns. — Joseph Wambaugh

He who recognizes no higher logic than that of the shilling may become a very rich man, and yet remain all the while an exceedingly poor creature; for riches are no proof whatever of moral worth, and their glitter often serves only to draw attention to the worthlessness of their possessor, as the glow-worm's light reveals the grub. — Samuel Smiles

the truth of all that the Savage now said about the worthlessness of friends who could be turned upon so slight a provocation into persecuting enemies. — Aldous Huxley

It seems that when we are oppressed by the knowledge of our worthlessness we do not see ourselves as lower than some and higher than others, but as lower than the lowest of mankind. We hate then the whole world, and we would pour our wrath upon the whole of creation. — Eric Hoffer

The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie — Friedrich Nietzsche

I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible of all accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worse possible corruption. The Christian Church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worse had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. — Jonathan Franzen

Essentially, people live in one of two ways. Either they live in awareness of their own worthlessness, or they live in their awareness of the worthlessness of the world. Two ways. Either you allow your value to be absorbed by the world, or you chisel away at the world's value and make it your own. Which should take precedence, the value of the world your own value? — NisiOisiN

Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In East, South and Central Africa, the minority manipulated the majority into believing the minority was the majority, that there were more whites in the world than blacks; instilled in the blacks a sense of inferiority, inadequacy, worthlessness. — Peter Abrahams

As a body in a world, here is our choice: we can be more loving or less loving. That's it. We can relax as the entire moment's show of love's swirl, feeling open as all
a vicious rainstorm, tweeting birds, our lover's lips, a sense of worthlessness
or we can close to some aspect of experience, pulling away as if we were separate. — David Deida

But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind. — Laura Hillenbrand

I know no surer way of shaking off the dreary crust formed about the soul by the trying to do one's duty or the patient enduring of having somebody else's duty done to one, than going out alone, either at the bright beginning of the day, when the earth is still unsoiled by the feet of the strenuous and only God is abroad; or in the evening, when the hush has come, out to the blessed stars, and looking up at them wonder at the meanness of the day just past, at the worthlessness of the things one has struggled for, at the folly of having been so angry, and so restless, and so much afraid. Nothing focusses life more exactly than a little while alone at night with the stars. What are perfunctory bedroom prayers hurried through in an atmosphere of blankets, to this deep abasement of the spirit before the majesty of heaven? And as a consecration of what should be yet one more happy day, of what value are those hasty morning devotions, — Elizabeth Von Arnim

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions - not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation or something I do not know. — C. G. Jung

In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness. — Norman O. Brown

He's the best physician who knows the worthlessness of most medicines. — Benjamin Franklin

Coming to terms with my feelings of worthlessness isn't always a bad time, but it's rarely a good one. — Dov Davidoff

My panic is rising again. My sense of isolation and worthlessness. And no other senses worth mentioning apparently. It's not nice being inside my head. It's a nice place to visit but I don't want to live here. It's too crowded; too many traps and pitfalls. I'm tired of it. That same old person, day in and day out. I'd like to try something else. I tried to neaten my mind, file everything away into tidy little thoughts, but it only got more and more cluttered. My mind has a mind of its own. I try to define my limits by seeing just how far I can go, and I find that I passed them weeks ago. And I've got to find my way back. — Carrie Fisher

Failure is another emotion I cannot stand to feel, because in adult life I have conditioned myself not to fail at anything. Failure takes me straight back to the feelings of worthlessness I grew up with as a stammering, reclusive little boy. — Jake Wood

A man who truly knows himself realizes his own worthlessness, and takes no pleasure in the praises of men. — Thomas A Kempis

There's an inherent message in my work relating to recycling and the nature of value, but my artistic inspiration is fired by the qualities within the raw materials ... I come across many things which have been abandoned and find something more in them than their intrinsic worthlessness. — Ptolemy

How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing. — Iris Murdoch

Here is The Boy with the Thorn in His Side, dying in your world. A man made monster with every human emotion, overdosed on worthlessness in a world that could never wrap it's head around him (so don't even try).
When it's all over just remember every single word you ever said was always just a bullet to his head. Bury him underground between friends and love - the only things that are gonna make it to the end with him. Look for his body buried beneath where the yellow weeds are growing and know he's still living in his nightmares. — Pete Wentz

Not long ago I learned from a certain person in considerable detail about the worthlessness of your character. All the same, it is you who have given me strength, you who have put the rainbow of revolution in my breast. It is you who have given an object to my life. — Osamu Dazai

I myself," said Gibbon, "am slightly underdone in the personal worthlessness line. It was Papa's fault. He used no irony. The communications mix offered by the parent to the child is as you know twelve percent do this, eighty-two percent don't do that, and six percent huggles and endearments. That is standard. Now, to avoid boring himself or herself to death during this monition the parent enlivens the discourse with wit, usually irony of the cheaper sort. The irony ambigufies the message, but more importantly establishes in the child the sense of personal lack-of-worth. Because the child understands that one who is talked to in this way is not much of a something. Ten years of it goes a long way. Fifteen is better. That is where Pap fell down. He eschewed irony. — Donald Barthelme

Contingent on what, though? Some bases for feeling good about oneself may be worse than others. Jennifer Crocker, a psychologist at Ohio State University, and her colleagues have shown that the prognosis is particularly bad when self-esteem hinges on outdoing others (competitive success), approval by others, physical appearance, or academic achievement.47 Consider the last of those. When children's self-esteem rises or falls with how well they do at school, achievement can resemble an addiction, "requiring ever greater success to avoid feelings of worthlessness." And if it looks as though success is unlikely, kids may "disengage from the task, deciding it doesn't matter, rather than suffer the loss of self-esteem that accompanies failure. — Alfie Kohn

If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer. — John Maynard Keynes

Guilt is the sum total of: All the negative feelings we have ever had about ourselves! Any form of self-hatred, self-rejection, feelings of worthlessness, sinfulness, inferiority, incompetence, failure, or emptiness. The feeling that there are things in us that are lacking or missing or incomplete. — Kenneth Wapnick

It is quite edifying to hear women speculate upon the worthlessness and the duration of beauty. But though virtue is a much finer thing, and those hapless creatures who suffer under the misfortune of good looks ought to be continually put in mind of the fate which awaits them; and though, very likely, the heroic female character which ladies admire is a more glorious and beautiful object than the kind, fresh, smiling, artless, tender little domestic goddess, whom men are inclined to worship - yet the latter and inferior sort of women must have this consolation - that the men do admire them after all; and that, in spite of all our kind friends' warnings and protests, we go on in our desperate error and folly, — William Makepeace Thackeray

When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.
Bhanggi — Faiqa Mansab

I am inviting you to discover that deeper than any pattern, deeper than personality, deeper than success or failure, deeper than worth or worthlessness, there is a radiance that is undeniable, always present - the truth of who you are. — Gangaji

Many Christians ... find themselves defeated by the most psychological weapon that Satan uses against them. This weapon has the effectiveness of a deadly missile. Its name? Low self-esteem. Satan's greatest psychological weapon is a gut level feeling of inferiority, inadequacy, and low self-worth This feeling shackles many Christians, in spite of wonderful spiritual experiences and knowledge of God's Word. Although they understand their position as sons and daughters of God, they are tied up in knots, bound by a terrible feeling inferiority, and chained to a deep sense of worthlessness. — David A. Seamands

I turned my face away. She should not act thus. She ought
not to excite my imagination with such displays of heavenly
innocence and happiness, nor awaken my heart from its slumbers,
in which it dreams of the worthlessness of life! — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Ash is submissiveness, worthlessness, irrelevance itself, and best of all, it is itself pervaded by the belief that it is fit for nothing. Is it possible to be more helpless, more impotent, and more wretched than ash? Not very easily. Could anything be more compliant and more tolerant? Hardly. Ash has no notion of character and is further from any kind of wood than dejection is from exhilaration. Where there is ash there is actually nothing at all. Tread on ash, and you will barely notice that you have stepped on anything. — Robert Walser

If we can effectively kill the national pride and patriotism of just one generation, we will have won that country. Therefore, there must be continued propaganda abroad to undermine the loyalty of citizens in general, and teenagers in particular. By making drugs of various kinds readily available, by creating the necessary attitude of chaos, idleness and worthlessness, and by preparing him psychologically and politically, we can succeed. — Vladimir Lenin

Should government refrain from regulation (taxation), the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent and the fraud can no longer be concealed. — John Maynard Keynes