Top 200 Emily Nagoski Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “Wellness is not a state of being, but a state of action.”

— Emily Nagoski

54. “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

55. “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

56. “No wonder people hate the word “patriarchy.” It’s a word that exposes and names a source of pain so old and deep we’ve learned to ignore it or treat it as if it’s how life should be.”

— Emily Nagoski

57. “We also know that the brain can handle only a limited amount of information at a time; at its simplest, we can think of stress as information overload, so when there’s too much happening, the brain starts to triage, prioritizing, simplifying, and even plain old ignoring some things.”

— Emily Nagoski

58. “A simple, practical exercise is to breathe in to a slow count of five, hold that breath for five, then exhale for a slow count of ten, and pause for another count of five. Do that three times – just one minute and fifteen seconds of breathing – and see how you feel.”

— Emily Nagoski

59. “And what a men-as-default, puritanical culture expects, wants, and likes is pleasure for men and babies for women.”

— Emily Nagoski

60. “And the answer is, of course, “Ugh, patriarchy.”

— Emily Nagoski

61. “Polite, socially acceptable suppression of our rage is “inauthentic,” insofar as we are not sharing our full selves. And that is part of trust, too. Part of being trustworthy is meeting expectations and staying in line, as if you were a well-behaved woman.”

— Emily Nagoski

62. “In terms of that little monitor in your brain, the solution is to sustain just a little bit of dissatisfaction – not enough to cross into frustration and certainly not so much that you fall off the cliff into the pit of despair, but enough to nourish your curious, “moving-toward” energy.”

— Emily Nagoski

63. “Happiness is predicated on ‘happenings,’ on what’s occurring, on whether your life is going right, and whether all is well. Joy arises from an internal clarity about our purpose.”1 When we engage with something larger than ourselves, we make meaning; and when we can resonate, bell-like, with that Something Larger, that’s joy.”

— Emily Nagoski

64. “And if a giver doesn’t obediently and sweetly hand over whatever a being wants, for that, too, the giver may be punished, shamed, or even destroyed.”

— Emily Nagoski

65. “The quality of our lives, day to day, is measured by our freedom to choose to stay or leave. That freedom comes when we have abundance enough and safety enough to let go of what is broken and reach for something new.17.”

— Emily Nagoski

66. “Not knowing why is, itself, a profound type of suffering.”

— Emily Nagoski

67. “The problem is not that women don’t try. On the contrary, we’re trying all the time, to do and be all the things everyone demands from us.”

— Emily Nagoski

68. “If you’re anxious or depressed, you are less curious about novelty and are more interested in being in a comfortable, familiar environment.”

— Emily Nagoski

69. “This means intentionally adding distance that creates an edgy instability or uncertainty, a slight and enjoyable dissatisfaction.”

— Emily Nagoski

70. “If you’re a woman in the industrialized West, you’ll confront a particular set of enemies that will try to cut you down to size, over and over, and they’ll lie to your face while they do it, saying it’s for your own good, saying you should be grateful for their “help.” And because we’ve been confronting these enemies literally since before we were born, we often believe them.”

— Emily Nagoski

71. “In short, emotions are tunnels. If you go all the way through them, you get to the light at the end. Exhaustion happens when we get stuck in an emotion.”

— Emily Nagoski

72. “Science is often expensive, and who pays for it can influence the outcome and whether or not the results are published. As enthusiastic as we are about evidence-based practices, it’s important to remember where that evidence comes from and why we might not see contrary evidence.”

— Emily Nagoski

73. “With positive reappraisal, you can acknowledge when things are difficult, and you recognize that the difficulty is worth it – it is in fact an opportunity.”

— Emily Nagoski

74. “The cure for burnout is not “self-care”; it is all of us caring for one another. So we’ll say it one more time: Trust your body. Be kind to yourself. You are enough, just as you are right now. Your joy matters. Please tell everyone you know.”

— Emily Nagoski

75. “When you were born, you were deeply, gloriously satisfied with each and every part of your body.”

— Emily Nagoski

76. “It turns out everyone’s sexual desire is responsive and context dependent. It just feels more spontaneous for some and more responsive for others, because even though we’re all made of the same parts, the different organizations of those parts results in different experiences.”

— Emily Nagoski

77. “When we feel distressed, our attachment object is our safe haven. Even – or perhaps especially – if our attachment object is the source of our distress.”

— Emily Nagoski

78. “We can think of insecure attachment as fitting into two different strategies: anxious and avoidant.”

— Emily Nagoski

79. “Your pleasure belongs to you, to share or keep as you choose, to explore or not as you choose, to embrace or avoid as you choose.”

— Emily Nagoski

80. “And the resource abundance of the environment you’re in changes how you decide to quit or stay. In a resource-rich environment, people actually quit and move on to the next opportunity sooner, because the risk of the move is lower. It’s easier to change jobs when you’ve got four offers. It’s easier to leave a bad relationship when you can go straight to a loving relationship with someone else.”

— Emily Nagoski

81. “When you are cruel to yourself, contemptuous and shaming, you only increase the cruelty of the world; when you are kind and compassionate to yourself, you increase the kindness and compassion in the world. Being compassionate toward yourself- not self-indulgent or self-pitying, but kind- is both the least you can do and the single most important thing you can do to make the world a better place... the world is changed when we change.”

— Emily Nagoski

82. “As Naomi Wolf puts it, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience.” Thin bodies are the bodies of women who behave themselves.”

— Emily Nagoski

83. “Emotional exhaustion happens when we get stuck in an emotion and can’t move through the tunnel. In Human Giver Syndrome, the giver isn’t allowed to inconvenience anyone with anything so messy as emotions, so givers are trapped in a situation where they are not free to move through the tunnel. They might even be punished for it.”

— Emily Nagoski

84. “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

85. “This is a book for any woman who has felt overwhelmed and exhausted by everything she had to do, and yet still worried she was not doing “enough.”

— Emily Nagoski

86. “That’s the power of meaning. We can tolerate any suffering, if we know why.”

— Emily Nagoski

87. “And then, as Christopher Hitchens puts it, when you’re a parent, “your heart is running around inside someone else’s body.”17.”

— Emily Nagoski

88. “The Mindful Way through Depression by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn. Don’t let the “through depression” part throw you; it’s a practical guide to managing any uncomfortable emotional experience.”

— Emily Nagoski

89. “In Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, philosopher Kate Manne describes a system in which one class of people,7 the “human givers,” are expected to offer their time, attention, affection, and bodies willingly, placidly, to the other class of people, the “human beings.”8 The implication in these terms is that human beings have a moral obligation to be or express their humanity, while human givers have a moral obligation to give their humanity to the human beings. Guess which one women are.”

— Emily Nagoski

90. “Your body, with its instinct for self-preservation, knows, on some level, that Human Giver Syndrome is slowly killing you. That’s why you keep trying mindfulness and green smoothies and self-care trend after self.”

— Emily Nagoski

91. “Redefining winning in terms of incremental goals is not the same as giving yourself rewards for making progress – such rewards are counterintuitively ineffective and may even be detrimental.12 When you redefine winning, you set goals that are achievements in themselves – and success is its own reward.”

— Emily Nagoski

92. “Wellness”is the freedom to move fluidly through the cycles of being human. Wellness is thus not a state of being; it is a state of action.”

— Emily Nagoski

93. “Never say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t want to say to your best friend or your daughter.”

— Emily Nagoski

94. “Love, according to the parable, is the pursuit of our own wholeness. We wander the earth in search of our lost half. And when two halves find each other, as Aristophanes says, “the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together;.”

— Emily Nagoski

95. “We call her “the madwoman in the attic,” and she’s the subject of the next, and last, chapter.”

— Emily Nagoski

96. “Struggle can increase creativity and learning, strengthen your capacity to cope with greater difficulties in the future, and empower you to continue working toward goals that matter to you.”

— Emily Nagoski

97. “Everyone’s life is different, and we are all doing our best. “Our best” today may not be “the best there is,” but it’s the best we can do today. Which is strange. And yet true. And could draw us down into helplessness and isolation if we don’t stay anchored. And the way we stay anchored is with gratitude.”

— Emily Nagoski

98. “It makes perfect sense when you think about it. If you’re moving toward a specific, desired goal, your attention and efforts are focused on that single outcome. But if you’re moving away from a threat, it hardly matters where you end up, as long as it’s somewhere safe from the threat.”

— Emily Nagoski

99. “We thrive when we have a positive goal to move toward, not just a negative state we’re trying to move away from. If we hate where we are, our first instinct often is to run aimlessly away from the owl of our present circumstances, which may lead us somewhere not much better than where we started. We need something positive to move toward. We need the cheese.”

— Emily Nagoski

100. “Creative Expression. Engaging in creative activities today leads to more energy, excitement, and enthusiasm tomorrow.”

— Emily Nagoski