Top 200 Emily Nagoski Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 3 of 5

101. “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

102. “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

103. “You turn into a bunny hiding under a hedge. Imagine a rabbit being chased by a fox, and she runs under a bush to hide. How long does she stay there? Until the fox is gone, right?”

— Emily Nagoski

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “We don’t need other people’s love in order to love ourselves; we don’t need a romantic partner to be ‘complete.’ But we need other people to teach us how to love ourselves best.”

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

109. “But we think rest matters not because it makes you more productive, but because it makes you happier and healthier, less grumpy, and more creative. We think rest matters because you matter. You are not here to be “productive.” You are here to be you, to engage with your Something Larger, to move through the world with confidence and joy. And to do that, you require rest.”

— Emily Nagoski

110. “Self-compassion is hard because healing hurts and growing stronger can be scary. But it’s worth it because healing helps us grow mighty enough to heal Human Giver Syndrome.”

— Emily Nagoski

111. “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

112. “And just as everyone’s genitals are normal and beautiful, so all women’s bodies are normal and beautiful. But mostly that’s not what women are taught. Mostly we’re taught that our bodies are supposed to be one specific shape, otherwise there’s something wrong with us. I’ll talk about that – and how to overcome it – in chapter 5.”

— Emily Nagoski

113. “How do we work with the organic intelligence of the body to heal? Instead of managing what comes up from the body, we work with it, trusting its purpose and direction, while holding a very particular, healing framework.”

— Emily Nagoski

114. “When you get right down to it, self-criticism is yet another form of stress... Literally, our stress hormone levels increase.”

— Emily Nagoski

115. “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

116. “This is what science can do for us, if we let it. If offers us an opportunity to lower our defenses and experience the ways that we are all connected.”

— Emily Nagoski

117. “From this point of view, intimate conversation, affection, and friendship are central to the erotic life of a long-term relationship.”

— Emily Nagoski

118. “But in the nineteenth century, with the rise of the middle class, it became fashionable for a man to be able to afford a wife who was too weak to work. It was a status symbol, an advertisement of wealth, for a man to have a wife who not only didn’t but couldn’t contribute to the household income. “Delicate” and “fragile” became feminine virtues.”

— Emily Nagoski

119. “But survival is not recovery; survival happens automatically, sometimes even against the survivor’s will.”

— Emily Nagoski

120. “Nonjudging is neutrally noticing your own internal states.”

— Emily Nagoski

121. “We need to discharge the stress response, complete the cycle, before our bodies can move on. “Home” is the place – physical and emotional – where we can discharge stress without being judged or shamed or told we just need to relax or forget about it. “Home” is where we receive our partner’s “loving presence.” People who listen with a loving presence are calm, attentive, and warmly attuned to the other person.”

— Emily Nagoski

122. “Allowing time and space for your body to move all the way through the cycle, to discharge stress and to connect wholly with your partner, is an essential part of creating a context that grants maximum access to pleasure.”

— Emily Nagoski

123. “We’ve locked ourselves, culturally, into our own fear, rage, and despair. We must build time, space, and strategies for discharging our stress response cycles.”

— Emily Nagoski

124. “Completing the cycle requires that, instead of hitting the brake on our stress, we gently remove our foot from both the accelerator and the brake and allow ourselves to coast to a stop.6 To do that, you create the right context and trust your body to do its thing.”

— Emily Nagoski

125. “That’s why you keep trying mindfulness and green smoothies and self-care trend after self-care trend. But that instinct for self-preservation is battling a syndrome that insists that self-preservation is selfish, so your efforts to care for yourself might actually make things worse, activating even more punishment from the world or from yourself, because how dare you?”

— Emily Nagoski

126. “1. emotional exhaustion – the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long; 2. depersonalization – the depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion; and 3. decreased sense of accomplishment – an unconquerable sense of futility: feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.1.”

— Emily Nagoski

127. “These changes in perception are not “just in your head.” People who are given a drug that will relax them and are told, “This is a drug that will relax you,” not only feel more relaxed compared to those who got the drug but not the information, they also have more of the drug in their blood plasma.11 Context changes more than how you feel; it can change your blood chemistry.”

— Emily Nagoski

128. “At last, Sophie let herself dive in, and her world transformed. She said, “I thought love would just be like being me, plus knowing that if I’m bleeding to death somebody will call an ambulance. But it’s more than that. I see myself in his eyes, and I find new ways to know and love myself, at the same time that I find new ways to know and love him, and then I know and love us and what we are together, which is this thing beyond what either of us is.”

— Emily Nagoski

129. “Images matter. They tell us what’s possible, what things go together, what belongs and what doesn’t belong. And we’re all just trying to belong somewhere.”

— Emily Nagoski

130. “This is the tragedy of the madwoman. She whips us, and we achieve things. And so we think the whipping is why we achieved things and we’ll never achieve anything without the whipping.”

— Emily Nagoski

131. “The quality of our lives is not measured by the amount of time we spend in a state of perfection. On the contrary, people of vision – think of the principal social justice leaders of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – see the largest gap between what is and what ought to be, and they know they will not live to see a world that fully achieves their vision of what’s possible. A gap between reality and perfection is not abnormal or a sign of dysfunction; it’s a normal part of life.”

— Emily Nagoski

132. “Realistic expectations can make all the difference-for instance, it’s normal for it to take six months to a year for a couple to get pregnant, and 15 percept of couples don’t conceive within that first year.”

— Emily Nagoski

133. “For a lot of people, the most difficult thing about “completing the cycle” is that it almost always requires that they stop dealing with whatever caused the stress, step away from that situation, and turn instead toward their own body and emotions.”

— Emily Nagoski

134. “The key to managing stress effectively is to make efforts to complete the cycle – unlock from freeze, escape the predator, kill the enemy, rejoice.”

— Emily Nagoski

135. “Lives may be experienced as meaningful when they are felt to have significance beyond the trivial or momentary, to have purpose, or to have a coherence that transcends chaos.”7.”

— Emily Nagoski

136. “Recovery requires an environment of relative security and the ability to separate the physiology of freeze from the experience of fear, so that the panic and the rage can discharge, completing their cycles at last.”

— Emily Nagoski

137. “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.”

— Emily Nagoski

138. “Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle.”

— Emily Nagoski

139. “We saw in chapter 8 that there are three ways you can address the gap between where you are and where you expect to be. You can ask yourself, “Is this the right goal for me?” or, “Am I putting in the right amount of the right kind of effort?” or, “Are my expectations of how much effort this particular goal requires realistic?” All three of these are different kinds of reality checks.”

— Emily Nagoski

140. “2. Social Appropriateness. Sometimes the brain activates a stress response and you can’t do the thing it’s trying to tell you to do:.”

— Emily Nagoski

141. “Breathing. Deep, slow breaths downregulate the stress response – especially when the exhalation is long and slow and goes all the way to the end of the breath, so that your belly contracts. Breathing is most effective when your stress isn’t that high, or when you just need to siphon off the very worst of the stress so that you can get through a difficult situation, after which you’ll do something more hardcore.”

— Emily Nagoski

142. “That means that somewhere inside them, they believe that if they’re isolated, that’s good; isolation protects others from their real, core badness. And if they’re suffering, that’s good; it prevents them from growing mighty, which might lead to them having power that they would inevitably fail to use effectively, or might even abuse.”

— Emily Nagoski

143. “Let’s invent a ritual where women celebrate the transition into their postpartum bodies. I mean, it’s not just its appearance that changes, it’s what your body means, to yourself and to the world.”

— Emily Nagoski

144. “Being grateful for good things doesn’t erase the difficult things.”

— Emily Nagoski

145. “When your brain is in a stressed state, almost everything is perceived as a potential threat.”

— Emily Nagoski

146. “A smell that seems pleasant when it’s labeled “cheese” smells gross when it is labeled “body odor.”

— Emily Nagoski

147. “John Gottman, in The Science of Trust, says that the problem is not lack of distance and mystery but lack of deepening intimacy.”

— Emily Nagoski

148. “Remember, your body has no idea what “filing your taxes” or “resolving an interpersonal conflict through rational problem-solving” means. It knows, though, what jumping up and down means. Speak its language – and its language is body language.”

— Emily Nagoski

149. “Second, our emotion-dismissing culture is uncomfortable with Feels. Our culture says that if the stressor isn’t right in front of us, then we have no reason to feel stressed and so we should just cut it out already. As a result, most people’s idea of “stress management” is either to eliminate all stressors or to just relax, as if stress can be turned off like a light switch.”

— Emily Nagoski

150. “Sometimes people resist letting go of self-criticism – “I suck!“ – because it can feel like giving up hope that you could become a better person, but that’s the opposite of how it works. How it really works is that when you stop beating yourself up, you begin to heal, and then you grow like never before.”

— Emily Nagoski