Imposter Syndrome Quotes

“Absolutely everybody wants to be liked (law 1).

Everyone feels different inside (less confident, less able, etc.) from how they infer other people to feel (law 2).

Few honest and courageous people who have achieved anything of real value in life do not feel a fraud much of the time (law 3).

Acceptance of these three 'laws' alone would save an awful lot of people an awful lot of grief!”
― David Smail, Power, Responsibility and Freedom

“It's easy for them to have opinions, and to express them with confidence. They don't worry about appearing ignorant or conceited.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“You're afraid that you suck.

And - at least if you never try - no one (especially you) will be able to confirm that.


Spoiler alert: This kind of thought doesn't come from an underachiever who's not good at anything.
This kind of thought comes from a perfectionist.

And truthfully? It's lame.



There's so much incredible potential in you. But you're going to squander it because trying may or may not confirm that you're not as good as you thought you were.

Stop being so hard on yourself!”
― Rachel Hollis, Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan for Embracing and Achieving Your Goals

“This idea that you’re undeserving, a fraud—that you’re not as smart or talented or “together” as people might think makes you an “imposter” and therefore unqualified in whatever it is you want to do and someday you’re going to be found out. By whom? The imposter police? You’re not an imposter, you’re a human being.”
― Anthony Meindl, Unstuck: A Life Manual On How To Be More Creative, Overcome Your Obstacles, and Get Shit Done

“I am becoming a tyrant, threatening in place of convincing. Unstable instead of steadying.

I am suited to the shadows, to the art of knives and bloodshed and coups, to poisoned words and poisoned cups. I never expected to rise so high as the throne. And I fear that I am utterly unsuited to the task.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“Do you know the power of your words? When you tell yourself stories that are not true your unconscious mind believes them. Your beliefs also can make you sick. You curse yourself by repeating lies.”
― Trish Taylor, Yes! You Are Good Enough

“As soon as a challenge was overcome, it creased to be a challenge, becoming the expected and ordinary rather than something I had achieved with difficulty, and could, therefore, be justly proud of. I could not own my own triumphs, nor give myself credit for them.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“The images had been provided by movies, books and Pathe News, and none included a six-foot tall Black woman hovering either in the back or in the foreground.”
― Maya Angelou, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas

“But Percy didn’t feel powerful. The more heroic stuff he did, the more he realized how limited he was. He felt like a fraud. I’m not as great as you think, he wanted to warn his friends. His failures, like tonight, seemed to prove it.
Maybe that’s why he had started to fear suffocation. It wasn’t so much drowning in the earth or the sea, but the feeling that he was sinking into too many expectations, literally getting in over his head.”
― Rick Riordan, The Mark of Athena

“Thinking Bigger
Begin by dreaming. If another human being has done it, there’s a good chance you can do it too. You get what you focus on. If you are continually thinking of all the things that can go wrong, they will.”
― Trish Taylor, Yes! You Are Good Enough

“No one has ever questioned the credentials of a critic who writes a rave notice.”
― Art Buchwald, Leaving Home

“Connell initially felt a sense of crushing inferiority to his fellow students, as if her had upgraded himself accidentally to an intellectual level far above his own, where he had to strain to make sense of the most basic premises.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Like so many men, he needed a woman stronger than himself, for behind the harsh cragginess of the Easter Island façade cowered the small boy, uncertain of himself.”
― Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels

“Humans are biased machines, and we are especially influenced by negatives. We want to believe the worst about ourselves and will pick those scraps up throughout the day and piece them together until we have something that we can look at and say, 'Look, arent I terrible' even if everyone else says otherwise. Maybe that's just me.”
― Charlotte Amelia Poe, How to Be Autistic

“Discover Your Origin Story
Our beliefs come from somewhere. We are not born believing that we are not good enough.”
― Trish Taylor, Yes! You Are Good Enough

“The ultimate act of surrender to God is rebellion against lies: the lies that the enemy has spoken to you, and the lies that you might have told yourself about you.”
― Andrena Sawyer

“What a horrible thing to fail like that. I couldn't stand failure. Maybe they would all say I wasn't smart (clever) anyway.”
― Gertrude Beasley, My First Thirty Years

“I wanted the challenge of creating something from nothing and watching it flourish and grow.”
― Colleen Hoover, It Starts with Us

“I sigh, peering out of the window. We’re far out of central
London now and I scan the streets, trying to get my bearings. We’re
getting nearer to Julian’s resting place. I recognise an old police station, converted into cheap flats. This part of London feels darker
than Mayfair. It’s as though the streetlights don’t shine as brightly.
Cheaper models, not as many. I like it. Every time I come here, on
a certain level, I relax. It almost feels more like home than Mayfair.
Mayfair is who I want to be, Hayes is who I am. My veins are the
dark streets, pulsing with traffic. There’s wreckage all around: craterous potholes, crumpled railings, abandoned cars, derelict homes.
Nothing’s ever repaired. It’s all broken. The poverty’s inescapable.
The air perpetually stinks.”
― Zoe Rosi, Pretty Evil

“Get into the rooms you need to be in so your work can do what it needs to do.”
― Akwaeke Emezi, You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty

“may you live out your life as a spectacle. may you be true to the you in the mirror”
― Malebo Sephodi

“i’ve arrived at a sort of emancipation moment. one that allows me to cultivate joy and pleasure in ways that feel liberatory. one that is radically indulgent and excessive. one that holds space for me in the midst of my fear - fear of my huge presence. fear of my light. fear of my weaknesses. fear of my sexuality. fear of my neurodivergence. fear of my magic. fear of my multiple selves and entities - one that allows me to reinvent myself as many times as this skinsuit is willing to carry me . one that grants me the permission to, in all its glory, make a “spectacle of myself”
― Malebo Sephodi

“You belong and this space is for you”
― Janna Cachola

“Put yourself in places where you don't belong, get used to it now because you will get there.”
― Janna Cachola

“It's funny," Dani continued. "When I was little, I used to be scared of the freezes. Every day I was terrified that time would stop and I'd be all alone again. And now..." She paused to look around at the strange, motionless world that had become so natural to her. "Now I can't wait for them. It's like this is my real life. In normal time, people don't really know me. They don't understand. It's weird feeling like you don't belong in your own life.”
― Jared Branahl & Ryan Johnson, Unbound

“Yet no matter how great I shone, I was the glitter of a single star amid a galaxy of constellations.”
― M.A. Kuzniar, Upon a Frosted Star

“It's worth mentioning that if you do a shotty job at your last-minute frenzied effort, you might take it as evidence that you really are a fraud. But in the back of your mind you've also got a convenient, built in excuse for your poor performance. It doesn't feel good to do sub-standard work, but on some level you can tell yourself that it's because you left it to the last minute, and not because you gave it your best shot and failed. Which is terrifying - because it's your worst fear becoming reality.”
― Cassandra Dunn, The Imposter Solution

“I am emptied through shallow breaths.
Muscles tighten in my chest.
I think I am a fool dressed up in king’s chamber,
holding a four-leaf clover.”
― Zaineb Afzal, Spare Change

“I told myself that everything was fine, that my life was incredible and I wasn’t sad and I’d just send more emails and swig whiskey in order to fall asleep at two a.m. every night, empty bottles lining the foot of my bed. I
wrung my body out like a towel, twisting both ends with red fists and sinking my teeth into it, gritting out, “It’s fine it’s fine it’s fine,” until one day, I woke up and there would be a new accolade on my shelf, a new accomplishment I could never have dreamed of, and then—finally—it would be fine. It’d be perfect. For that day. Or an hour. And then tendrils of the dread started peeking into the corners of my vision. And I had to start all over again.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“I told myself that everything was fine, that my life was incredible and I wasn’t sad and I’d just send more emails and swig whiskey in order to fall asleep at two a.m. every night, empty bottles lining the foot of my bed. I wrung my body out like a towel, twisting both ends with red fists and sinking my teeth into it, gritting out, “It’s fine it’s fine it’s fine,” until one day, I woke up and there would be a new accolade on my shelf, a new accomplishment I could never have dreamed of, and then—finally—it would be fine. It’d be perfect. For that day. Or an hour. And then tendrils of the dread started peeking into the corners of my vision. And I had to start all over again.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma