Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-brake on.
Maxwell MaltzRead
It was as if personality itself had a 'face'. This non-physical face of personality seemed to be the real key to personality change. It remained scarred, distorted, 'ugly' or inferior the person himself acted out this role in his behaviour regardless of the changes in physical appearance. If this 'face of personality' could be reconstructed, if old emotional scars could be removed, then the person himself changed, even without facial plastic surgery.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that true personality change comes from addressing emotional scars rather than just physical appearance.
Maxwell Maltz emphasizes that personality is deeply intertwined with emotional experiences and self-perception. He argues that external appearances do not determine one's essence; instead, the internal 'face of personality,' shaped by past experiences and emotions, plays a crucial role in one's behavior. By healing these emotional scars, individuals can transform their personalities, leading to genuine change, even if their physical appearance remains the same.
Themes
PersonalityChangeEmotionsMental HealthTransformation
In practice
Example use cases
Use this quote in a workshop on personal development to illustrate the importance of inner healing.
More from Maxwell Maltz
All quotes →Of all the traps and pitfalls in life, self-disesteem is the deadliest, and the hardest to overcome: for it is a pit designed and dug by our own hands, summed up in the phrase, 'It's no use - I can't do it.'
Maxwell MaltzRead
Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a 'real' experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information which you give to it from your forebrain. Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you THINK or IMAGINE to be 'true.
Maxwell MaltzRead
The 'self-image' is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.
Maxwell MaltzRead
Our self image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become.
Maxwell MaltzRead
Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible.
Maxwell MaltzRead
Similar quotes
A hurt is at the center of all addictive behaviors. . . . The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain
Gabor MateRead
It's during dream sleep where we start to actually take the sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional experiences that we've been having. And sleep almost divorces that emotional, bitter rind from the memory experiences that we've had during the day.
Matthew WalkerRead
The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
R. D. LaingRead
Psychopaths are social predators, and like all predators, they are looking for feeding grounds. Wherever you get power, prestige and money, you will find them.
Robert D. HareRead
I think the relationship between social-dominance orientation in people and the extent to which they're made uncomfortable by ambiguity and novelty is really important. Better a stable world that's familiar, in which I'm doing pretty poorly, than dealing with all the ambiguity of a changing world.
Robert SapolskyRead
Interpretations, criticisms, diagnoses, and judgments of others are actually alienated expressions of our unmet needs.
Marshall B. RosenbergRead