While it makes sense to place a monetary value on goods and services, it doesn’t make sense to use money to determine your value as a human being. The amount of money you earn or expensive possessions you own will never be enough to satisfy your need to feel worthy.

Compare yourself to no one. Comparison is a foolproof way of ignoring the awesome things you have done or can do. When you compare yourself to others, you’re measuring your worth by their terms.

Your own terms are the only ones that matter, every person has walked a different path to get where they are today, make your own standards, they will matter to you longer than those of anyone else.

Instead of measuring your worth based on another person’s scale, concentrate on what is meaningful to you, whether that’s being balanced, being a kind person, or living a faith tradition.

Embrace your mistakes, and learn from them. Though we can’t change the past, we can control how we handle those mistakes.

Our life is full of opportunities. One can even say that life itself is one big opportunity. Remember those personal standards? When you sweep up every chance to grow and develop, you’ll be well on your way to meeting those terms, and you’ll be proud of yourself for the work you put in.

Take opportunities to develop yourself. Once you see that you can achieve the goals you set out for yourself, you can gradually move on to tackling bigger goals because you have a wealth of experience to draw from.

Share your journey with someone you trust. Regardless of where you are in life, it’s essential to remember that the quest for self-worth never ends. There will always be room to learn more.

Measure your self-worth by who you are at your core. Doing so will help you focus on behaving according to your values, instead of chasing the things that will temporarily boost your self-esteem.

Making your self-worth dependent upon others, however, is like chasing a moving target. If you base your self-worth entirely upon how others perceive you, you’ll never be able to receive enough praise or positive reinforcement to feel good about yourself.

Basing your self-worth on your job title is a big risk. A health problem, economic downturn, or unexpected shift in the job market may interfere with your career and lead to a major identity crisis.

In the absence of a high profile career, you won’t be able to feel good about yourself if you’ve always measured your self-worth by what you do.

While it’s normal for your accomplishments to make you feel good, basing your entire self-worth on your achievements is like building your house on an unsteady foundation. You’ll need to experience repeated success in order to feel good about yourself – and that’s hard to maintain over the long-haul.

If you were fortunate enough to be blessed with good looks, your beauty may serve as an advantage in life. But,a handsome face or a beautiful body won't last forever. Wrinkles, a middle-age spread,gray hair, or a receding hairline can become catastrophic for anyone whose self-worth depends on their physical appearance.

The way you choose to measure your worth as a person will serve as a major factor in the choices you make, the thoughts you have about life, and the way you feel about yourself.

If there is anything in your life that is not truly benefitting you, I want you to cut it out. There are too many wonderful things in this world that you could be doing instead- things that make you happy, things that make you come alive.

When you know who you are - and you're pleased with the person you've become - you’ll maintain a sense of peace throughout life’s inevitable ups and downs.

Question what you do, and why you do it. Whenever you're tired or annoyed, figure out what's making you feel that way, and change it. It's never because of other people, or situations- it's your reaction to them.

Do what you want to do. You're amazing just the way you are. And you know what the best thing is? When you're fully yourself, you naturally encourage others to be too.

Rather than experience major fluctuations in how you feel about yourself based on your latest success or most recent failure, you’ll believe in yourself regardless.

People will always judge, whether you be yourself or try and be somebody that you’re not. It’s inevitable, so why not take the easier route and just be you?

Being yourself isn’t always going to be easy. But you won’t truly feel happiness and peace within yourself until you stop caring about what others think. Stop worrying about what others think about you, for their opinion does not matter. Start being the you that is you.

Being yourself is about being honest with yourself and other people. Being afraid of being yourself means that your life doesn’t align with your true needs.

When you stop being afraid of being yourself, you stop trying to hide aspects of yourself for which you feel irrational shame.

When you stop being afraid of being yourself, you forgive yourself the mistakes and blunders you’ve made on the road to becoming who you are, and you stop feeling guilty for things that were beyond your control.

When you start feeling the freedom and joy that being yourself can give you in life, you’ll not feel the need to go back to caring what other people think of you.

Once you are truly being yourself, you’ll no longer feel prisoner to other people’s judgments of you. You’ll be comfortable with how you’re living your life, so other people’s opinions won’t matter to you anymore.

Once you’ve cracked being yourself, you’ll start feeling the freedom to assert your own desires on the world around you. In this way, you’ll start manifesting your own vision in the external world.

Once you’ve experienced the freedom to assert yourself and the overall good that asserting yourself can bring for others too, you’ll feel like an active participant in your own destiny.

When you’re not being yourself, it stands to reason that you don’t meet people who are compatible with your true personality. Once you start living in accordance with your true desires, it’s logical that you’ll start attracting people who are compatible with your true self.

Once you start being yourself, you’ll start to understand the value of your unique contribution, and you’ll cease to sell yourself short. You’ll recognize what your priorities are in life and take the risks you need to in order to make your external reality match your internal truth.

When you feel confident in being yourself, you’ll start to play an active role in your destiny. Only when you start being yourself will you feel what it’s like to really take control of your life. You’ll start directing things rather than being directed.

When you start to behave in a way that is honest, your actions will become more spontaneous and will cause you less anxiety.

By being yourself you simply live in the present moment, where the truth lies. With the focus and clarity that comes of doing so, you become impervious to the barrage of external and internal assaults on your decisiveness. It is a power that can lead to a feeling of ecstasy and even salvation.

Although I know it's unfair I reveal myself one mask at a time.

I love Chicago. Chicago is my home.

Nobody does anything for one reason.

In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.

The people of Zimbabwe have a responsibility to ensure that the government that they elected behaves properly.

I was never a villain on the stage. I always played strong, sympathetic types. My first stage role with a speaking part, believe it or not, was as a priest. It wasn't until I began acting in films that the producers and directors saw me primarily as a bizarre villain.

At my age, no one is married, no one has kids, no one has a career.

It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is I cant remember if its the thirteenth or the fourteenth.

Those who oppressed us described us as the Dark Continent!

It's always tense when you move a character from a book to the screen. Always tense.

There's a long tradition in Western thought that humans are not shackled by biology, whereas animals are pure instinct machines.

Up until I was about 12, I was a ballet dancer and a basketball player.

I like to carry a concealer palette that has a green, a yellow, and a tan color. I like to carry the green one because when I have a pimple, it's good to use that to contrast the red. Then you put the yellow over it, and it helps it disappear.

Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.

It sounds funny, but the 2008 Olympics were something that just kind of happened, and I was lucky they came at a point when I was uninjured and well prepared. As a gymnast, you can't ask for much more.