Top 40 Baek Se-hee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “To right every wrong you come across in the world would be an impossible endeavor for any one person. You’re just one person, and you’re putting too much of the weight of the world on yourself.”

— Baek Se-hee

2. “I wonder about others like me, who seem totally fine on the outside but are rotting on the inside, where the rot is this vague state of being not-fine and not-devastated at the same time.”

— Baek Se-hee

3. “When you’re having a hard time, it’s natural to feel like you’re having the hardest time in the world. And it’s not selfish to feel that way.”

— Baek Se-hee

4. “The important thing here isn’t whether you are being loved, it’s how you will accept the love that comes your way.”

— Baek Se-hee

5. “Ucapan semangat, ucapan pendukung agar kita bisa lebih berani dan ucapan agar kita tidak menciut bisa jadi adalah racun bagi kita.”

— Baek Se-hee

6. “What do I wish for? I want to love and be loved. Without suspicion, and with ease.”

— Baek Se-hee

7. “But books are different. I often look for books that are like medicine, that fit my situation and my thoughts, and I read them over and over again until the pages are tattered, underlining everything and still the book will have something to give me. Books never tire of me. And in time they present a solution, quietly waiting until I am fully healed. That’s one of the nicest things about books.”

— Baek Se-hee

8. “Because it begins with me and ends with everyone.”

— Baek Se-hee

9. “What matters isn’t what people say but what you like and find joy in. I hope you focus less on how you look to other people and more on fulfilling your true desires.”

— Baek Se-hee

10. “Sometimes, this directive to cheer up and buck up is like poison that rots one’s soul. Note that the bestselling self-help books and essay collections of the past ten years aren’t about whipping yourself, they’re about healing and consolation. Being imperfect is all right and being awkward is okay. You don’t have to cheer up. I can do well today, or not. It’ll be an experience either way. And that’s fine.”

— Baek Se-hee

11. “If twenty-year-old me met me today, she would cry with joy. And that’s enough for me.”

— Baek Se-hee

12. “Fear increases when it’s something that you keep to yourself. Instead of suffering alone, it can often be good to share it with someone else.”

— Baek Se-hee

13. “It’s like you’re running inside a hamster wheel. You try to get out of your depression through your efforts but fail, and this continuing cycle of trying and failing feeds back into the original depression.”

— Baek Se-hee

14. “You keep obsessively holding yourself to these idealised standards, forcing yourself to fit them. It’s another way, among many, for you to keep punishing yourself.”

— Baek Se-hee

15. “I used to love being alone. Lying in my bed as I read or daydreamed, taking walks, listening to music on the bus or subway, napping, all of these were my favourite times of the day. But for the past two weeks I’ve felt inundated by a strange feeling called ‘boredom’.”

— Baek Se-hee

16. “I hope you will listen to a certain overlooked and different voice within you. Because the human heart, even when it wants to die, quite often wants at the same time to eat some tteokbokki, too.”

— Baek Se-hee

17. “When we’re sinking in water, it can be a relief to feel the ground beneath our feet, the rock bottom, because we know we can kick against it to rise again. But if you can’t feel the ground in life, the fear can be overwhelming.”

— Baek Se-hee

18. “Mungkin hidup bersama-sama dengan orang lain adalah cara yang tepat yang bisa memberikan napas lega di tengah dunia yang penuh dengan kegelapan dan kesesakan.”

— Baek Se-hee

19. “Books never tire of me. And in time they present a solution, quietly waiting until I am fully healed.”

— Baek Se-hee

20. “To tell the truth, no one was looking down on me except myself.”

— Baek Se-hee

21. “Aku tidak mengerti kenapa seseorang diperlakukan tidak baik hanya karena ia tidak sesuai dengan standar yang berlaku di masyarakag. Aku juga tidak paham mengapa seorang pribadi harus menyesuaikan dirinya dengan standar yang ditentukan dalam masyarakat. Padahal menurutku pihak yang salah adalag orang yang memandang rendah orang lain yang tidak sesuai dengan standar yang berlaku.”

— Baek Se-hee

22. “I tend to go back and forth between romanticism and cynicism. Crossing those barriers between hot and cold, I forget the lukewarm boredom of life; that lukewarm state is what I fear the most. Unable to return to feeling hot or cold, to be numb within a state of room temperature. In that state, we’re nothing better than dead.”

— Baek Se-hee

23. “Your self-esteem determines how you feel about the sincerity of others.”

— Baek Se-hee

24. “In effect, it’s your thoughts that are torturing you.”

— Baek Se-hee

25. “I want to love and be loved. I want to find a way where I don’t hurt myself. I want to live a life where I say that things are good more than things are bad. I want to keep failing and discovering new and better directions. I want to enjoy the tides of feeling in me as the rhythms of life. I want to be the kind of person who can walk inside the vast darkness and find the one fragment of sunlight I can linger in for a long time.”

— Baek Se-hee

26. “Psychiatrist: If you make yourself anxious to gain attention, someone will give you attention. Then you get comfortable, and the other person will as well. But after that, you feel despair again. Despite your intentions, you start thinking, If I’m happy then this person will stop paying attention to me, which naturally leads to you trying to avoid becoming happy at all costs.”

— Baek Se-hee

27. “Usually before a dream becomes reality, we tend to think we’ll wish for nothing else if only the dream is realised. Imagine how you’d feel if you always remembered that your dream has already been fulfilled. Everything that comes after would be like a lovely bonus.”

— Baek Se-hee

28. “I think you need to spatially separate your work and your rest. If you were stressed at work, you ought to be relaxing when you’re home, but you’re sitting at home listening to recordings of yourself. This mixes up the two spaces, which makes you feel near-constant shame and anxiety.”

— Baek Se-hee

29. “Perhaps you’re co-dependent on your work as well. When you get good results, your worth is realised and you relax, but that satisfaction doesn’t last long – that’s the problem.”

— Baek Se-hee

30. “I feel too young to have seen the life and death of a living sentient being.”

— Baek Se-hee

31. “Aku ingin menikmati gelombang perasaanku seolah aku sedang menari pada sebuah musik. Aku berharap aku bisa menjadi seseorang yang kebetulan menemukan secercah cahaya dan bertahan bersama cahaya itu setelah lama berjalan di dalam kegelapan yang besar. Aku percaya suatu hari nanti aku bisa menjadi seperti itu.”

— Baek Se-hee

32. “I hope you learn to look at a person as a whole before judging them.”

— Baek Se-hee

33. “Sometimes, when someone tells me to ‘Cheer up’ when I’m going through a tough time, I just want wring their neck.”

— Baek Se-hee

34. “Aku ingin mengalami kegagalan kemudian mengarahkan lagi pandanganku ke jalan yang lebih baik.”

— Baek Se-hee

35. “It’s impossible to fathom the sadness of those who are left behind, but if life gives one more suffering than death, shouldn’t we respect their right to end life? We are so bad at mourning in our society. Maybe it’s a failure of respect. Some call those who choose their own death sinners or failures or losers who give up. Is living until the end really a triumph in every case? As if there can be any true winning or losing in this game of life.”

— Baek Se-hee

36. “All beginnings and endings feel so heavy to me. I am too much of a worrier to focus on the happiness of the moment.”

— Baek Se-hee

37. “Togetherness means altruism, and altruism is what saves us from selfishness.”

— Baek Se-hee

38. “I am someone who is completely unique in this world, someone I need to take care of for the rest of my life, and therefore someone I need to help take each step forwards, warmly and patiently, to allow to rest on some days and to encourage on others – I believe that the more I look into this strange being, myself, the more routes I will find to happiness.”

— Baek Se-hee

39. “What I need to practice from now on is to stop trapping myself in the same formula of, ‘This is what I have to be doing,’ and to simply acknowledge the fact that I am an independent individual.”

— Baek Se-hee

40. “To learn about and imagine the emotions that I don’t understand or immediately empathize with: that is the affection I extend to others, and the only way to ensure that what’s inside of us don’t dry up or rot.”

— Baek Se-hee

41. “I can do well today, or not. It’ll be an experience either way.”

— Baek Se-hee

42. “Books never tire of me. And in time they present a solution, quietly waiting until I am fully healed. That’s one of the nicest things about books.”

— Baek Se-hee

43. “If you grow enough self-esteem. When that happens, you may find you’re no longer interested in aspiring to perfection or chasing some ideal.”

— Baek Se-hee

44. “It finally occurred to me that to expect someone to always be a certain way or consistently do a certain thing can be a huge burden on them.”

— Baek Se-hee

45. “Art has given me faith: faith that today may not have been perfect but was still a pretty good day, or faith that even after a long day of being depressed, I can still burst into laughter over something very small.”

— Baek Se-hee

46. “Your high school grades do not determine the rest of your life.”

— Baek Se-hee

47. “This is a record of a very ordinary, incomplete person who meets another very ordinary, incomplete person, the latter of whom happens to be a therapist.”

— Baek Se-hee