Awesome Quotes and Sayings About Being Socially Awkward
Quotations & Citations:
It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.
~Stephen Fry, Moab is my Washpot
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
~Henry Stanley Haskins
I’m not anti-social. I’m just not social.
~Woody Allen
I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside. Because how do you meet a new person? I was very stunned by this for many years. And then I realized, you just say, “Hi.” They may ignore you. Or you may marry them. And that possibility is worth that one word.
~Augusten Burroughs
The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.
~Charles de Gaulle
I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.
~Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Face what you think you believe and you will be surprised.
~William Hale White
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
~Ray Bradbury
What great thing would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?
~Robert H. Schuller
I’ve spent most of my life and most of my friendships holding my breath and hoping that when people get close enough they won’t leave, and fearing that it’s a matter of time before they figure me out and go.
~Shauna Niequist
The future is called “perhaps,” which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the only important thing is not to allow that to scare you.
~Tennessee Williams
When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial.
~Fernando Pessoa
Courage is to feel the daily daggers of relentless steel and keep on living.
~Douglas Malloch
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
~Ludwig Wittgenstein
Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.
~George Smith Patton
Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I’m too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.
~Martin Amis, Other People
No one has yet computed how many imaginary triumphs are silently celebrated by people each year to keep up their courage.
~Henry S. Haskins
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
~Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
When we are afraid we ought not to occupy ourselves with endeavoring to prove that there is no danger, but in strengthening ourselves to go on in spite of the danger.
~Mark Rutherford
I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.
~Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel
Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.
~Raymond Lindquist
Suddenly he saw himself as others in the crowd must surely see him; a silent, solitary figure, standing apart from the rest. He looked out at the hoardes of singing, laughing people and felt more alone than he’d ever felt in his life. Was this how it was going to be then? Was this who he was? A man apart from his fellows, making the journey through life alone?
~Mary Lawson, The Other Side of the Bridge
Sometimes the biggest act of courage is a small one.
~Lauren Raffo
In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it… She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow.
~Dan Rather
The moment of crisis had come, and I must face it. My old fears, my diffidence, my shyness, my hopeless sense of inferiority, must be conquered now and thrust aside. If I failed now I should fail forever.
~Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.
~Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
Into the dark night
Resignedly I go,
I am not so afraid of the dark night
As the friends I do not know,
I do not fear the night above
As I fear the friends below.~Stevie Smith, Selected Poems
Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I’ll try again tomorrow.
~Mary Anne Radmacher
All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.
~John Banville
Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact.
~George Bernard Shaw
All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it? – I don’t know.
~Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon — instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
~Dale Carnegie
Does a society exist where it’s become acceptable to wear ‘helmets’ enclosing one’s entire head when in public to preempt social interaction
~Tao Lin
The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
~Abraham Maslow
In our hearts… there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they’re foreigners – even in their native lands. In our hearts… there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity.
~John Irving, A Son of the Circus
We are always getting ready to live but never living.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
People want to see that other people are interested in you before they become interested in you, unfortunately, they come after you when you’re no longer interested in them.
~Michael Bassey Johnson
Mental health problems do not affect three or four out of every five persons but one out of one.
~William Menninger
For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people’s faces.
~Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.
~Jerome Lawrence
I was afraid to board a streetcar because of the conductor; I was afraid to enter the Kabuki Theater for fear of the usherettes standing along the sides of the red-carpeted staircase at the main entrance; I was afraid to go into a restaurant because I was intimidated by the waiters furtively hovering behind me waiting for my plate to be emptied.
~Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.
~Rainer Maria Rilke
In other people’s company I felt I was dull, gloomy, unwelcome, at once bored and boring…
~André Gide
Tears are the safety valve of the heart when too much pressure is laid on it.
~Albert Smith
I swear that I will never cause trouble for anybody, as long as I live!! So please! Nobody cause any trouble for me, either!
~Minoru Furuya
The neurotic is always half-drowning in anxiety, and always being half-rescued.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook
Waves are the sea’s white daughters,
And raindrops the children of rain,
But why for my shimmering body
Have I a mother like Pain?Night is the mother of stars,
And wind the mother of foam—
The world is brimming with beauty,
But I must stay at home.~Sara Teasdale, Flame and Shadow
The neurotic longs to touch bottom, so at least he won’t have that to worry about anymore.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook
What we can see in most societies is the gravity of suffering, tears of sorrow and nightmares of hopelessness.
~Nilantha Ilangamuwa, The Naked Power
The way you treat yourself sets the standard for others.
~Sonya Friedman
Never ignore the elephant in the room. That’s rude; play with it and introduce it.
~Donna Lynn Hope
When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.
~African Proverb
She untied her ropes, her frazzled oily grimy ropes that held her down into the littered marshlands of a life too long lived in fear and dread of the unknown, and took a big step out of bounds.
~Ella M. Kaye, Shadowed Lights
I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.
~Louisa May Alcott
It’s me who is my enemy
Me who beats me up
Me who makes the monsters
Me who strips my confidence.~Paula Cole, “Me,” This Fire
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
~William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
To lead by example is difficult when you’re a follower of fear.
~T.A. Sachs
Other people’s opinion of you does not have to become your reality.
~Les Brown
It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
~Edmund Hillary
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
~Eleanor Roosevelt
Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From the evil which never arrived.~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Somehow our devils are never quite what we expect when we meet them face to face.
~Nelson DeMille