Life & Wisdom Quote by May Sarton

Self-respect, in Sarton’s hands, isn’t a shining badge you wear into battle; it’s a prop you lean on until it snaps. The first sentence lands like a rebuke to the tidy, therapeutic version of dignity: “nothing to hide behind” suggests a posture, a shield, an alibi. It punctures the comforting idea that if you can just cultivate enough self-regard, you’ll be inoculated against shame, grief, or other people’s contempt. Sarton is suspicious of the way self-respect can harden into performance: a moral costume that keeps others out, and keeps the messier parts of the self offstage.

Then she twists the knife: “When you need it most it isn’t there.” The line is bleak because it’s psychologically accurate. In moments of crisis - humiliation, abandonment, depression, failure - the very mechanism you’re told to rely on is often the first thing to evaporate. Self-respect becomes conditional, revealed as something that depends on steadier days: routine, health, a sense of being lovable, the ordinary frictionless functioning of life. Under pressure, the “self” you were respecting splinters, and the respect with it.

Context matters: Sarton’s work is steeped in interior weather, solitude, and the labor of living honestly with one’s own mind. This reads like a warning from someone who’s watched moral virtues get romanticized into guarantees. The subtext isn’t nihilism; it’s an argument for sturdier supports than pride - relationships, practices, compassion - things that don’t vanish exactly when you’re at your weakest.