These narcissism quotes will inspire you. Narcissism, pathological self-absorption, was first identified as a mental disorder by the British essayist and physician Havelock Ellis in 1898.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging narcissism quotes, narcissism sayings, and narcissism proverbs.
Best Narcissism Quotes
- “An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.” ~ Carl Jung
- “Narcissism and self-deception are survival mechanisms without which many of us might just jump off a bridge.” ~ Todd Solondz
- “Narcissism is actually a clever guise adopted to mask its exact opposite, which is a deep well of self-loathing, a well of low self-esteem, rather than high self-esteem. This helps explain why narcissists are so sensitive to criticism, why narcissists tend to break into outrage if they’re criticized, because their self-esteem is actually much more brittle than it seems, and once they’re challenged, that mask falls apart.” ~ Jeffrey Kluger
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“Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.” ~ Sigmund Freud
- “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
- “Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.” ~ T. S. Eliot
- “Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.” ~ Frank Leahy
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“It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.” ~ Voltaire
- “Hate is the complement of fear and narcissists like being feared. It imbues them with an intoxicating sensation of omnipotence.” ~ Sam Vaknin
- “Big egos are big shields for lots of empty space.” ~ Diane Black
- “Love isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.” ~ Erich Fromm
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“I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity.” ~ Diana Vreeland
- “He who falls in love with himself will have no rivals.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
- “The narcissist devours people, consumes their output, and casts the empty, writhing shells aside.” ~ Sam Vaknin
- “Withhold admiration from a narcissist and be disliked. Give it and be treated with indifference.” ~ Mason Cooley
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“Egotism is the art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.” ~ George V. Higgins
- “Vanity and narcissism — the compulsive need to be admired and praised — undermine one’s courage, for one then fights on someone else’s conviction rather than one’s own.” ~ Rollo May
- “The narcissist enjoys being looked at and not looking back.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “Since narcissism is fueled by a greater need to be admired than to be liked, psychologists might use that fact as a therapeutic lever – stressing to patients that being known as a narcissist will actually cause them to lose the respect and social status they crave.” ~ Jeffrey Kluger
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“Self-love forever creeps out, like a snake, to sting anything which happens to stumble upon it.” ~ Lord Byron
- “Narcissism, like the other personality disorders, is a condition that’s known as ego-syntonic. In other words, the paranoid person really does believe that people are after him, and the narcissist really does believe that he or she is better than or more entitled than other people, and truly doesn’t see why that’s not the case.” ~ Jeffrey Kluger
- “I don’t care what you think unless it is about me…” ~ Kurt Cobain
- “America was built on rugged individualism, and today that has evolved into a culture of narcissism. But God didn’t create you to live for you. If you want to follow Jesus, you have to put aside your selfish ambition.” ~ Rick Warren
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“I think a lot of self-importance is a product of fear. And fear, living in sort of an un-self-examined fear-based life, tends to lead to narcissism and self-importance.” ~ Moby
- “Narcissus weeps to find that his Image does not return his love.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “All of nationalism can be understood as a kind of collective narcissism.” ~ Geoff Mulgan
- “There’s a definition of narcissism that when a parent is narcissistic, instead of the child seeing himself reflected in the mother’s face and the mother’s joy, the child of the narcissistic parent feels like, ‘What can I do to make her okay, to make her happy?'” ~ Susan Sullivan
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“Politics has become infused with narcissism in America.” ~ John Oliver
- “The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “The very wealthy and the very famous have a much closer affinity with the indigent street person than with the rest of us. There’s the narcissism, the addiction, even the outlandish dress. Often they don’t put great value in relationships.” ~ Drew Pinsky
- “I thought narcissism was about self-love till someone told me there is a flip side to it… It is unrequited self-love.” ~ Emily Levine
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“Never underestimate the narcissism of a writer.” ~ Elia Kazan
- “My vanity and narcissism will never let me go too far.” ~ Jay Baruchel
- “We live in a historical period characterized by a sharp discrepancy between the intellectual development of man… and his mental-emotional development, which has left him still in a state of marked narcissism with all its pathological symptoms.” ~ Christopher Lasch
- “As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.” ~ Daniel J. Boorstin
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“Narcissism really spreads its wings and soars on Twitter. It’s like watching a dragon hatch and learn to fly.” ~ Dave Anthony
- “Really life is about narcissism; no one is ever thinking about you much. You always think people are thinking about you way more than they are.” ~ Lizz Winstead
- “Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children’s most primitive fears.” ~ Henry Cloud
- “[Donald] Trump’s narcissism seems to be reflected in his need to be liked and treated positively.” ~ David Krieger , Positive narcissism quotes
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“Love made us partners in narcissism, and we talked ceaselessly about how close we were, how perfect our connection was, like we were the first people in history to ever get it exactly right.” ~ Jonathan Tropper
- “L’Oreal’s slogan ‘because you’re worth it’ has come to epitomize banal narcissism of early 21st-century capitalism; easy indulgence and effortless self-love all available at a flick of the credit card.” ~ Geoff Mulgan
- “What will the world be quite overturned when you die?” ~ Epictetus
- “Walter had never liked cats. They’d seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals’ lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He’d never seen anything in a cat’s face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where it’s true heart lay…cats were all about using people” ~ Jonathan Franzen
- “My generation, we’re more accepting of narcissism. But we’re looking at images that are dead, that are on your phone. My friends have apps to make you look skinny, to make your skin look perfect. And we look at these images and we’re like, “That’s beauty. That’s perfect.” But when you see a real person, you’re like, “Wait, that’s not perfect.”” ~ Elle Fanning
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“The great accomplishment of Jobs’s life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies – his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness – in the service of perfection.” ~ Malcolm Gladwell
- “One thing that’s great about having kids, especially given my career, is that it forces you out of your narcissism. I mean, I’m in a career where my product is me. So it was nice to have something, someone, come along and take the focus off me. I really needed to give myself some distractions from myself.” ~ Michelle Pfeiffer
- “I am in love with you’, I responded. He laughed the most beguiling and gentle laugh. ‘Of course, you are,’ he replied. ‘I understand perfectly because I’m in love with myself. The fact that I’m not transfixed in front of the nearest mirror takes a great deal of self-control.’ It was my turn to laugh.” ~ Anne Rice
- “Adolescents swing from euphoric self-confidence and a kind of narcissistic strength in which they feel invulnerable and even immortal, to despair, self-emptiness, self-deprecation. At the same time they seem to see an emerging self that is unique and wonderful, they suffer an intense envy which tears narcissism into shreds, and makes other people’s qualities hit them like an attack of lasers.” ~ Terri E Apter
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“If I post a selfie, and you like it, it’s of little cost to you, but it feels great to me. That becomes addictive, and you see people’s narcissism so quickly. I think that’s a very dangerous thing for us all to be addicted to.” ~ Kim Stolz
- “These illustrations suggest four general maxims[…]. The first is: remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself. The second is: don’t over-estimate your own merits. The third is: don’t expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself. And the fourth is: don’t imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you.” ~ Bertrand Russell
- “Having a child makes you realize the importance of life – narcissism goes out the window. Heaven on earth is looking at my little boy. The minute he was born, I knew if I never did anything other than being a mom, I’d be fine.” ~ Jenny McCarthy
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“Parents are supposed to give the child back to herself with love. If they’ve got duct tape over their eyes because of narcissism, it doesn’t happen.” ~ Jane Fonda
- “No one has probably helped me more with my narcissism than my dog.” ~ Tucker Max
- “I can never tell what I’m doing when I’m in the middle of publication because I have no confidence. I have terrible self-esteem, along with boundless narcissism.” ~ Anne Lamott
- “Well-being is possible to the degree to which one has overcome one’s narcissism; to the degree to which one is open, responsive, sensitive, awake, empty…. Well-being means, finally, to drop one’s Ego, to give up greed, to cease chasing after preservation and the aggrandizement of the Ego, to be and to experience one’s self in the act of being, not in having, preserving, coveting, using.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “Secularism breeds narcissism. There is nothing higher to live for, so you live for you” ~ Dennis Prager
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“People, no matter the economic class, find ways to feed their narcissism.” ~ Lynne Tillman
- “When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.” ~ Brené Brown
- “No one ever questions the disorder behind her tarantula LA glamour – sociopathy, narcissism – because it’s good rock and roll, good entertainment! I have a low tolerance for manipulative, egomaniacal behavior, and usually have to remind myself that the person might be mentally ill.” ~ Kim Gordon
- “Love of country cannot be a supersized version of individual narcissism. True love of country-of this country-is love of our children, of a creed that promises them a better life before it promises us anything, and embraces the sacrifices needed to make that better life. True love of country is giving ourselves to a cause and a purpose larger than ourselves. And that cause is to make liberty worth having, to make the pursuit of happiness deeper than the quest for personal pleasure, and to leave a legacy of progress and possibility.” ~ Eric Liu
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“I imagine there’s a level of narcissism that goes into thinking you’re enough.” ~ Michael Ian Black
- “For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.” ~ John Steinbeck
- “Don’t talk about yourself; it will be done when you leave.” ~ Wilson Mizner
- “If we weren’t born with anti-social passions – narcissism, envy, lust, meanness, greed, hunger for power, just to name the more obvious – why the need for so many laws, whether religious or secular, that govern behavior?” ~ Dennis Prager
- “I like to be admired from afar, and then complimented up close.” ~ Gena Showalter
