I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.
- Topic: Integrity, Respect, Self-esteem
- Location: Yosemite National Park
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from Frederick Douglass
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither person nor property will be safe.
More Quotes from Yosemite National Park
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Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.
The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively.
It cannot be your duty to do anything that is beyond your reach or your strength at the moment. It cannot be your duty to do anything that sacrifices your own integrity or your own spiritual development.
If you are ever tempted to look for outside approval, realize that you have compromised your own integrity. If you need a witness, be your own.
With integrity, you have nothing to fear, since you have nothing to hide.
Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a life.
All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows he knows his course is wrong and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.
People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.
When I was playing before I retired, I never really understood the appreciation and respect that people gave me. People had treated me like a god or something, and that was very embarrassing.
Keep in mind that the true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good.
Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that's real power.
To establish true self-esteem, we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives.
We can secure other people’s approval, if we do right and try hard; but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that.
The only competition worthy of a wise man is with himself.
I could not understand how any man could be so brutalized as to claim the right to dispose of the lives of others, nor how any man could be so lacking in self-esteem as to grant to others the right to dispose of his life.
