41 Quotes About Inadequacy

Suffering from feelings of inadequacy can leave you feeling broken and hopeless. Here are some great quotes about inadequacy that capture the potency of these feelings as you seek a reprieve.

“Advertisers in general bear a large part of the responsibility for the deep feelings of inadequacy that drive women to psychiatrists, pills, or the bottle.”

“As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”

“Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.”

“But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.”

“Christians who have come to terms with their inadequacies, fears, and failures. Believers who have become discontent with ‘surviving’ and have taken the time to investigate everything God has to offer in this life.”

“Confront your inadequacies and push your personal boundaries: It’s the surest way to grow, improve and expand the scope of your influence.”

“Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.”

“Every painting is a war. You have to struggle every day, and to struggle every day with your inadequacies is a damn nuisance.”

“Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation.”

“God’s plan’ is often a front for men’s plans and a cover for inadequacy, ignorance, and evil.”

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

“I feel very lucky to have grown up having interaction with adults who were making change but who were far from perfect beings.”

“Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together.”

“It is possible that an individual may be successful, largely because he conserves all his powers for individual achievement and does not put any of his energy into the training which will give him the ability to act with others.”

“Liberalism, above all, means emancipation – emancipation from one’s fears, his inadequacies, from prejudice, from discrimination, from poverty.”

“Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.”

“Mistakes and failures are precisely your means of education. They tell you about your own inadequacies.”

“Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.”

“Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.”

“Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.”

“Nothing destroys a relationship quicker than our fears of inadequacy and loss.”

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us.”

“Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

“Politics, as I never tire of saying, is for social and emotional misfits, handicapped folk, those with a grudge. The purpose of politics is to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power.”

“Sometimes all that saves me is being willing to make mistakes. There are projects that strike me as so beautiful, important, complicated, or just plain big, that they convince me of my own inadequacy.”

“The great difficulty is first to win a reputation; the next to keep it while you live; and the next to preserve it after you die, when affection and interest are over, and nothing but sterling excellence can preserve your name.”

“The judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth.”

“The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled by procrastination, consumed by feelings of panic, self-loathing, and soul-crushing inadequacy. And that’s on a good day.”

“The Savior desires to save us from our inadequacies as well as our sins. Inadequacy is not the same as being sinful – we have far more control over the choice to sin than we may have over our innate capacity.”

“The struggle against atheism is foremost and of necessity a struggle against the inadequacy of our own theism.”

“The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.”

“There are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being.”

“Today our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution, considered as a simple, understood, and explained phenomenon which keeps rapidly unfolding before us.”

“We can either watch life from the sidelines, or actively participate… Either we let self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy prevent us from realizing our potential, or embrace the fact that when we turn our attention away from ourselves, our potential is limitless.”

“We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.”

“When we turn our attention away from ourselves, our potential is limitless.”

“Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.”

“Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before.”

“You can be loved by your family, your mate, and your friends yet not love yourself. You can be admired by your associates yet regard yourself as worthless.”

“Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.”

Mastering your feelings on inadequacy requires commitment and understanding to the situation.