“If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us… We play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.”
![“[F]or several thousand years we have been obsessed with a false humility—on the one hand, putting ourselves down as mere creatures" who came into this world by the whim of God or the fluke of blind forces, and on the other, conceiving ourselves as separate personal egos fighting to control the…” quote by Alan W. Watts](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/3b3/alan-w-watts-9497_thousand-years_f-or-several-thousand-years-we-have-been_1176586.jpg)
![“[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just…” quote by Alain de Botton](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/c16/alain-de-botton-221_altered_t-he-unsympathetic-assessments-we-make-o_2167022.jpg)
