Some relevant quotes

To know all is to forgive all.
Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.
Love is the answer.
Love thy neighbor as you love yourself.
Forgive and forget.
The power to change is in the present moment.
Love heals everything.
Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.

Self-esteem is the real magic wand that can form a child’s future. A child’s self-esteem affects every area of her existence, from friends she chooses, to how well she does academically in school, to what kind of job she gets, to even the person she chooses to marry.
ATTRIBUTION:	Stephanie Martson (20th century), U.S. family therapist, author. The Magic of Encouragement, ch. 1 (1990).

Self-esteem creates natural highs. Knowing that you’re lovable helps you to love more. Knowing that you’re important helps you to make a difference to to others. Knowing that you are capable empowers you to create more. Knowing that you’re valuable and that you have a special place in the universe is a serene spiritual joy in itself.
ATTRIBUTION:	Louise Hart (20th century), U.S. psychologist, educator. The Winning Family, ch. 4 (1987).

Self-esteem is as important to our well-being as legs are to a table. It is essential for physical and mental health and for happiness.
ATTRIBUTION:	Louise Hart (20th century), U.S. psychologist, educator. The Winning Family, ch. 20 (1987).

”But most of all respect thyself.”—A precept of the Pythagoreans.

In order to feel good about himself, a child must be successful in his own eyes, not just in your eyes. Self-esteem is an inner feeling: Sometimes it corresponds with outer reality, and sometimes it doesn’t.
ATTRIBUTION:	Stanley I. Greenspan (20th century), U.S. clinical professor of psychiatry, behavioral sciences, pediatrics, and author. Playground Politics, ch. 3 (1993).

Sonnet LXII.

“Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye”

SIN of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,	5
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp’d with tann’d antiquity,	10
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
’Tis thee, myself,—that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.

William Shakespeare

A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune; an expectation which the child, if justice is done him, will nobly disappoint. By working on the theory that this resemblance exists, we shall do what in us lies to defeat his proper promise and produce the ordinary and mediocre. I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make another man you. One’s enough.

ATTRIBUTION:

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. “Education,” Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883, repr. 1904).

Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin As self-neglecting.
ATTRIBUTION:	William Shakespeare (1564–1616), British dramatist, poet. Dauphin, in Henry V, act 2, sc. 4, l. 74-5.

Self-love depressed becomes self-loathing.
ATTRIBUTION:	Sally Kempton (b. 1943), U.S. author. “Cutting Loose,” Esquire (New York, July 1970).

As a character disorder, narcissism is the very opposite of strong self-love. Self-absorption does not produce gratification, it produces injury to the self; erasing the line between self and other means that nothing new, nothing “other,” ever enters the self; it is devoured and transformed until one thinks one can see oneself in the other—and then it becomes meaningless. This is why the clinical profile of narcissism is not of a state of activity, but of a state of being. There are erased the demarcations, limits, and forms of time as well as relationship. The narcissist is not hungry for experiences, he is hungry for Experience. Looking for an expression or reflection of himself in Experience, he devalues each particular interaction or scene, because it is never enough to encompass who he is. The myth of Narcissus neatly captures this: one drowns in the self—it is an entropic state.

ATTRIBUTION:

Richard Sennett (b. 1943), U.S. social historian. “The Actor Deprived of His Art,” The Fall of the Public Man, Cambridge University Press (1977).

Had we not loved ourselves at all, we could never have been obliged to love anything. So that self-love is the basis of all love.
ATTRIBUTION:	Thomas Traherne (1636–1674), British clergyman, poet, mystic. “Fourth Century,” no. 55, Centuries (written c. 1672, publ. 1908).

I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.
ATTRIBUTION:	June Jordan (b. 1939), U.S. poet, civil rights activist. Address, 1978, to the Black Writers’ Conference, Howard University. “Where Is the Love?” Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (1989).

Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condenses and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual’s body.
ATTRIBUTION:	Thomas Szasz (b. 1920), U.S. psychiatrist. “Control and Self-control,” The Second Sin (1973).

Success matters very much to the under-six age group. These children want so desperately to be able to hold their heads high. They sound exceedingly boastful: “I can count up to five....” “I can tie my shoes....” “I know how old I am. Do you want to see...?” Each child maintains his own public relations office. He is continuously concerned with getting his name and his skill and his knowledge and his power into the “headlines.” But we mustn’t be misled by this drumbeating. The bombast is as much for the child’s benefit as for ours—he can’t quite believe his own importance.

ATTRIBUTION:

James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century), U.S. child development specialist, author. Teaching the Child Under Six, ch. 2 (1968).

QUOTATION:	Success is a process, a quality of mind and way of being, an outgoing affirmation of life.
ATTRIBUTION:	Alex Noble, “In Touch with the Present” Christian Science Monitor 6 Mar 79