Top 200 Emily Nagoski Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Emotions are tunnels. You have to go all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end.”

— Emily Nagoski

2. “The good news is that stress is not the problem. The problem is that the strategies that deal with stressors have almost no relationship to the strategies that deal with the physiological reactions our bodies have to those stressors. To be “well” is not to live in a state of perpetual safety and calm, but to move fluidly from a state of adversity, risk, adventure, or excitement, back to safety and calm, and out again. Stress is not bad for you; being stuck is bad for you.”

— Emily Nagoski

3. “Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating your central nervous system into a calm state.”

— Emily Nagoski

4. “The moral of the story is: We thrive when we have a positive goal to move toward, not just a negative state we’re trying to move away from.”

— Emily Nagoski

5. “It’s not about weight or size or fat – weight is a measure of gravity and nothing else – it’s about living joyfully inside your body, as it is, today.”

— Emily Nagoski

6. “Self-compassion is emphatically not self-esteem. Self-esteem is about self-evaluation, your perceived value as a human being, which is often contingent upon your sense of personal success in comparison with others. Self-compassion, by contrast, is unconditional and nonevaluative. We can have self-compassion when we’re doing well and when we’re struggling – because life has treated us harshly or because we made a mistake.23.”

— Emily Nagoski

7. “Emotions are physiological cascades that want to complete their cycles, and they will complete those cycles when you allow them to; they want to be travelers, not residents. They want to move on. Let them. You may tremble or shake or cry or curl up in a ball. You may notice your body doing these things without your volition. Your body knows what to do, and it will do it as long as you sit calmly with it, as you would sit calmly beside a sick or grieving child.”

— Emily Nagoski

8. “Turn toward that self-critical part of you with kindness and compassion. Thank her for the hard work she has done to help you survive.”

— Emily Nagoski

9. “Because you’ve dealt with the stressor,” I said, “but not the stress. Your bodies still think you’re being chased by the lion.”

— Emily Nagoski

10. “Dread is anxiety on steroids.”

— Emily Nagoski

11. “Rest” doesn’t just mean sleep – though of course sleep is essential. Rest also includes switching from one type of activity to another. Mental energy, like stress, has a cycle it runs through, an oscillation from task focus to processing and back to task focus. The idea that you can use “grit” or “self-control” to stay focused and productive every minute of every day is not merely incorrect, it is gaslighting, and it is potentially damaging your brain.”

— Emily Nagoski

12. “I can’t change the injury that the world inflicted on you, and neither can you. What you can do is heal.”

— Emily Nagoski

13. “Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle and recalibrating your central nervous system into a calm state. When people say, ‘Exercise is good for stress,’ that is for realsie real.”

— Emily Nagoski

14. “That is not what “positive reappraisal” means; it’s not as simple as “look on the bright side” or “find the silver lining” or “enjoy the journey.” Nor is it about not feeling frustrated by the persistent gap between what is and what could or should be. Nor does it mean sticking your fingers in your ears and going, “La la la, nothing is wrong, everything is fine!”

— Emily Nagoski

15. “If we turn toward someone with our difficult feelings – sadness, anger, hurt – and they tune in to our feelings without judgment or defensiveness, it helps us to move through that feeling, like a tunnel, to the light at the end. This definition of trust can be boiled down to one question: “Are you there for me?”17 Trustworthy people are there for each other, and that mutual trust and trustworthiness maximizes wellness for both people.”

— Emily Nagoski

16. “Until you spread your wings, you’ll have no idea how far you can walk.”

— Emily Nagoski

17. “Love is having. Desire is wanting. And you can want only what you don’t already have.”

— Emily Nagoski

18. “Rest is, quite simply, when you stop using a part of you that’s used up, worn out, damaged, or inflamed, so that it has a chance to renew itself.”

— Emily Nagoski

19. “Raise your hand if you’ve asked yourself, How much more do I have to do before I’ve done enough? How much of myself do I have to give? How smoothly do I have to polish myself before I can move through the world without friction?”

— Emily Nagoski

20. “But women aren’t broken versions of men; they’re women.”

— Emily Nagoski

21. “Most of us have spent our whole lives being taught to believe everyone else’s opinions about our bodies, rather than to believe what our own bodies are trying to tell us. For some of us, it’s been so long since we listened to our bodies, we hardly know how to start understanding what they’re trying to tell us, much less how to trust and believe what they’re saying. To make matters worse, the more exhausted we are, the noisier the signal is, and the harder it is to hear the message.”

— Emily Nagoski

22. “What you pay attention to matters less than how you pay attention.”

— Emily Nagoski

23. “Medieval anatomists called women’s external genitals the “pudendum,” a word derived from the Latin pudere, meaning “to make ashamed.” Our genitalia were thus named “from the shamefacedness that is in women to have them seen.”1.”

— Emily Nagoski

24. “All your body requires of you is that you turn toward it with kindness and compassion, with nonjudgment and plain-vanilla acceptance of all your contradictory emotions, beliefs, and longings.”

— Emily Nagoski

25. “The pleasure of synchronized movement is built into our biology, and it’s a powerful tool to access your greatest well-being.”

— Emily Nagoski

26. “Relax your belly. It’s supposed to be round. The Bikini Industrial Complex has been gaslighting you.”

— Emily Nagoski

27. “We’re raising women to be sexually dysfunctional, with all the ‘no’ messages we’re giving them about diseases and shame and fear. And then as soon as they’re eighteen they’re supposed to be sexual rock stars, multiorgasmic and totally uninhibited. It doesn’t make any sense. None of the things we do in our society prepares women for that.”

— Emily Nagoski

28. “If you’re hiding from your life, you’re past your threshold. You aren’t dealing with either the stress or the stressor. Deal with the stress so you can be well enough to deal with the stressor.”

— Emily Nagoski

29. “Self-criticism is an invasive weed in the garden, but too many of us have been taught to treat it like a treasured flower, even as it strangles the native plants of our sexuality. Far from motivating us to get better, self-criticism makes us sicker.”

— Emily Nagoski

30. “Sexual violence often doesn’t look like what we think of as “violence” – only rarely is there a gun or knife; often there isn’t even “aggression” as we typically think of it. There is coercion and the removal of the targeted person’s choice about what will happen next.”

— Emily Nagoski

31. “The problem isn’t the desire itself, it’s the context. You need more sexually relevant stimuli activating the accelerator and fewer things hitting the brake.”

— Emily Nagoski

32. “Remind yourself that the day you were born, your body was a cause for celebration, for love without condition, and that’s just as true today as it was then.”

— Emily Nagoski

33. “What can I say? Science is made of people, and people can be stupid.”

— Emily Nagoski

34. “When you can see your body as it is, rather than what culture proclaims it to Mean, then you experience how much easier it is to live with and love your genitals, along with the rest of your sexuality, precisely as they are.”

— Emily Nagoski

35. “Should” is all about what you’re “doing wrong.”

— Emily Nagoski

36. “Bodies are imperfect, and sometimes they let us down. They are susceptible to disease and breakage and entropy. Our bodies can disappoint us, and the world can punish us when our bodies aren’t what they “should” be. So we are not suggesting that you “love your body,” like that’s an easy fix. We’re suggesting you be patient with your body and with your feelings about your body.”

— Emily Nagoski

37. “The belief that the people around us will reciprocate in proportion to what we give them is called “trust.”

— Emily Nagoski

38. “I used to think it was selfish to prioritize sleep, but then I realized the opposite was true. The people I love and the work I care about deserve me at my best, not exhausted and cranky and unfocused.”

— Emily Nagoski

39. “If you’re trying to do something where you will inevitably fail and be rejected repeatedly before you achieve your goal, then you will need a nonstandard relationship with winning, focusing on incremental goals.”

— Emily Nagoski

40. “Part of recovering from a loss is turning toward your grief with kindness and compassion, as well as completing the cycle of stress brought on by failure. But another part is recognizing failing’s unintended positive outcomes.”

— Emily Nagoski

41. “Positive Social Interaction. Casual but friendly social interaction is the first external sign that the world is a safe place.”

— Emily Nagoski

42. “For so many reasons, quitting is hard, and we can’t tell you what the right decision is. But knowing the factors that shape our reluctance to give up, we can say this: If you’re feeling not just frustrated and challenged, but helpless, isolated, and trapped, like you want to hide in a cave, or like you’d rather put your hand in a toilet full of tadpoles than spend one more day doing the thing, you should definitely quit whatever it is.”

— Emily Nagoski

43. “I believe in the sun, even when it is not shining. I believe in love, even when feeling it not. I believe in God, even when He is silent.”

— Emily Nagoski

44. “Laughter. Laughing together – and even just reminiscing about the times we’ve laughed together – increases relationship satisfaction.”

— Emily Nagoski

45. “In the garden metaphor, the cultural messages about women’s sexuality are very often weeds, encroaching in ways no one chose but that everyone has to manage.”

— Emily Nagoski

46. “Human givers must, at all times, be pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others, which means they must never be ugly, angry, upset, ambitious, or attentive to their own needs.”

— Emily Nagoski

47. “And even though I’d love you to find meaning in every page, every paragraph of this book, cherry-pick from here, too. We’re all different, so what’s relevant for you is definitely, absolutely not the same as what’s relevant for me or for any of the many hundreds of women I’ve taught. Take what’s relevant. Ignore what isn’t; it’s there for somebody else who needs it.”

— Emily Nagoski

48. “We know by now that there’s no such thing as normal – or rather, that we’re all normal. We’re all made of the same parts as everyone else, organized in a unique way. No two alike.”

— Emily Nagoski

49. “But then we get exhausted and we wonder if we can accomplish any of the things we hope for, without destroying ourselves in the process. We ask ourselves if it’s time to quit.”

— Emily Nagoski

50. “You might notice yourself checking things, picking at things, thinking obsessive thoughts, or fiddling with your own body in a routinized kind of way. These are signs that the stress has overwhelmed your brain’s ability to cope rationally with the stressor.”

— Emily Nagoski