I know a few extremely confident--not cocky, confident--people. (Here's how you can tell if someone is genuinely confident.) It's as if they were born that way.

The rest of us sometimes lack confidence--and we often lack belief in ourselves when we need it most.

Fortunately, self-confidence is a quality you can develop. Anyone can be more confident. (Even me.)

But building self-confidence takes time. So if you need a quick shot of it, here are some great motivational quotes that will inspire you to feel more self-assured:

1. "When you're different, sometimes you don't see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the person who doesn't." --Jodi Picoult
2. "As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
3. "You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with." --Wayne Dyer
4. "Just pick a goal, a goal you truly want to achieve, and take a clear-eyed look at your weaknesses--not so you'll feel less confident, but so you can determine exactly what you need to work on. Then get to work. Celebrate small successes. Analyze your weaknesses. Keep going. As you gain skill, you'll also gain a feeling of genuine confidence, one that can never be taken away--because you've earned it." (OK, that one is mine, he said, blushing.)
5. "Don't waste your energy trying to change opinions ... do your thing, and don't care if they like it." --Tina Fey
6. "Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it." --Bryce Courtenay
7. "The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you." --William Jennings Bryan
8. "If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced." --Vincent van Gogh
9. "Always be yourself and have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and try to duplicate it." --Bruce Lee
10. "Don't wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles, and less than perfect conditions. So what? Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident, and more and more successful." --Mark Victor Hansen
11. "You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do." --Eleanor Roosevelt
12. "Low self-confidence isn't a life sentence. Self-confidence can be learned, practiced, and mastered--just like any other skill. Once you master it, everything in your life will change for the better." --Barrie Davenport
13. "Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit." --E.E. Cummings
14. "Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement." --Golda Meir
15. "One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation." --Arthur Ashe
16. "It is confidence in our bodies, minds, and spirits that allows us to keep looking for new adventures." --Oprah Winfrey
17. "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
18. "But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration--because it's a leap of faith. And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. You have to be willing to take those risks." --James Cameron
19. "People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within." --Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
20. "Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong." --Peter T. McIntyre
21. "Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they're yours." --Richard Bach
22. "The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable." --Paul Tillich
23. "If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves." --Thomas Alva Edison
24. "Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people." --Andre Dubus
25. "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. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be?" --Marianne Williamson
26. "Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love." --Brené Brown
27. "Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do." --Dr. Benjamin Spock
28. "Successful people have fear, successful people have doubts, and successful people have worries. They just don't let these feelings stop them." --T. Harv Eker
29. "You can have anything you want if you are willing to give up the belief that you can't have it." --Dr. Robert Anthony
30. "It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves." --Sir Edmund Hillary
31. "To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance." --Oscar Wilde
32. "I had to grow to love my body. I did not have a good self-image at first. Finally it occurred to me, I'm either going to love me or hate me. And I chose to love myself. Then everything kind of sprung from there. Things that I thought weren't attractive became sexy. Confidence makes you sexy." --Queen Latifah
33. "You yourself, as much as anyone in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection." --Buddha
34. "Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy." --Dale Carnegie
35. "Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence." --Helen Keller
36. "Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude." --Thomas Jefferson
37. "Confidence is a habit that can be developed by acting as if you already had the confidence you desire to have." --Brian Tracy
38. "When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around." --Willie Nelson
39. "If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think." --T. Harv Eker
40. "Wouldn't it be powerful if you fell in love with yourself so deeply that you would do just about anything if you knew it would make you happy? This is precisely how much life loves you and wants you to nurture yourself. The deeper you love yourself, the more the universe will affirm your worth. Then you can enjoy a lifelong love affair that brings you the richest fulfillment from inside out." --Alan Cohen
41. "To anyone that ever told you you're no good ... They're no better." --Hayley Williams
42. "Always remember you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think." --Christopher Robin
43. "You have no control over other people's taste, so focus on staying true to your own." --Tim Gunn
44. "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." --Eleanor Roosevelt
45. "The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it." --J.M. Barrie
46. "It's a dead-end street if you sit around waiting for someone else to tell you you're OK." --Michael Pitt
47. "I think that the power is the principle. The principle of moving forward, as though you have the confidence to move forward, eventually gives you confidence when you look back and see what you've done." --Robert Downey Jr.
48. "If you're presenting yourself with confidence, you can pull off pretty much anything." --Katy Perry
49. "Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sail. Explore. Dream. Discover." --Mark Twain
50. "I've finally stopped running away from myself. Who else is there better to be?" --Goldie Hawn
51. "Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth." --Rumi
52. "We avoid the things that we're afraid of because we think there will be dire consequences if we confront them. But the truly dire consequences in our lives come from avoiding things that we need to learn about or discover." --Shakti Gawain
53. "Persons of high self-esteem are not driven to make themselves superior to others; they do not seek to prove their value by measuring themselves against a comparative standard. Their joy is being who they are, not in being better than someone else." --Nathaniel Branden
54. "Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many--not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some." --Charles Dickens
55. "Tension is who you think you should be, relaxation is who you are." --Chinese proverb