Top 200 Emily Nagoski Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “A smell that seems pleasant when it’s labeled “cheese” smells gross when it is labeled “body odor.”

— Emily Nagoski

152. “Self-compassion is being patient with yourself through that process – and being patient with yourself when you need to take a break.”

— Emily Nagoski

153. “To feel normal is to feel that you belong.”

— Emily Nagoski

154. “Positive reappraisal involves recognizing that sitting in traffic is worth it. It means deciding that the effort, the discomfort, the frustration, the unanticipated obstacles, and even the repeated failure have value – not just because they are steps toward a worthwhile goal, but because you reframe difficulties as opportunities for growth and learning.3.”

— Emily Nagoski

155. “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

156. “Affection. When friendly chitchat with colleagues doesn’t cut it, when you’re too stressed out for laughter, deeper connection with a loving presence is called for. Most often, this comes from some loving and beloved person who likes, respects, and trusts you, whom you like, respect, and trust.”

— Emily Nagoski

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “Why we fall in love is attachment, which is sort of a biological pursuit of wholeness.”

— Emily Nagoski

163. “Because story goes where science can’t.”

— Emily Nagoski

164. “Self-criticism is associated with worse health outcomes, both mental and physical, and more loneliness.”

— Emily Nagoski

165. “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

166. “But often there’s a huge resistant knot of beliefs that has to be untangled before the person can get there.”

— Emily Nagoski

167. “We’re not saying that “beautiful” is what your body should be; we’re saying beautiful is what your body already is.”

— Emily Nagoski

168. “This is the most common reason we hear when people resist self-compassion. They’re worried that if they stop beating themselves up, they’ll lose all motivation, they’ll just sit around watching Real Housewives of Anywhere and eating Lucky Charms in a bowl full of Bud Light.”

— Emily Nagoski

169. “That’s why it’s so important that we give it a name: We call it “the Feels,” and it’s nothing to fear. It’s a normal, healthy part of completing the cycle, a physiological reaction that will end on its own, usually lasting just a few minutes. Feels usually happen in extreme cases where the stress response cycle is interrupted suddenly and not allowed to complete. It’s part of the healing process following a traumatic event or long-term, intense stress.”

— Emily Nagoski

170. “Novices who are thoroughly incompetent rate themselves as very confident in their ability to do a thing they’ve just learned to do. By contrast, genuine experts know how difficult their work is, so they are realistic about their competence and thus rate their confidence in their own abilities as moderate, even as their performance is, of course, expert-level.”

— Emily Nagoski

171. “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.”

— Emily Nagoski

172. “Ask your closest friends to describe the “real you,” the characteristics of your personality and your life that are at the core of your best self.”

— Emily Nagoski

173. “But you can recognize the pain as part of the healing, and you can trust your heart to heal, just as you trust your bones to heal, knowing that it will gradually hurt less and less as you recover.”

— Emily Nagoski

174. “Your brain has a built-in mechanism to assess when it’s time to quit. Listen to its quiet voice. Or do a worksheet; sometimes that’s easier.”

— Emily Nagoski

175. “Each person’s experience of survival is unique, but it often includes a kind of disengaged unreality.”

— Emily Nagoski

176. “But the best romance novels are the ones where the se isn’t just gratuitous for the sake of entertainment.”

— Emily Nagoski

177. “You can’t make someone be patient any more than you can make someone have an orgasm. You create a great context, and then allow it to happen.”

— Emily Nagoski

178. “As Perel puts it in her TEDx talk, “In desire, we want a bridge to cross.”

— Emily Nagoski

179. “And it’s a new kind of pain; it can’t be managed by the same strategies you’ve been using to manage the pain of the whip. You were good at managing that old kind of pain, and now you have to learn a whole new way to deal with this whole new kind of pain. As one client of “compassionate mind therapy” put it, if they started practicing self-compassion, they “would open up a well of unbearable sadness.”13.”

— Emily Nagoski

180. “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

181. “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

182. “2. Reserve thirty minutes of each day for a “stress-reducing conversation.” If your stress-reducing conversation partner is your life partner, you might also add a weekly hour-long “state of the union” conversation. Research recommends these as the standards for sustaining a satisfying relationship.39.”

— Emily Nagoski

183. “Givers are not supposed to need anything. If they dare to ask for or, God forbid, demand anything, that’s a violation of their role as a giver and they may be punished. 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

184. “The solution is to practice replacing self-criticism with self-kindness.”

— Emily Nagoski

185. “Flight is fear – avoidance – whereas fight is anger – approach – but they’re both the “GO!” stress response of the sympathetic nervous system. They tell you to do something.”

— Emily Nagoski

186. “Difficult feelings are not dangerous because they, like all feelings, are tunnels. When you go all the way through them, you get to the light at the end. They may be uncomfortable, for sure; that’s kind of their point. When you experience them, that’s your embodied mind alerting you that it perceives a potential problem or a threat. But the feelings themselves are not dangerous, just as a lifeguard’s whistle alerting everyone to get out of the ocean is not dangerous.”

— Emily Nagoski

187. “Let’s think about what this does to just one system, the cardiovascular: Chronically activated stress response means chronically increased blood pressure, which is like constantly turning a firehose on in your blood vessels, when those vessels were designed by evolution to handle only a gently flowing stream. The increased wear and tear on your blood vessels leads to increased risk for heart disease. That’s how chronic stress leads to life-threatening illness.”

— Emily Nagoski

188. “Every Disney heroine has an “I Want” song, in which they explain what’s missing in their lives. Moana feels called by the ocean. Tiana is “Almost There,” saving money to start her own restaurant. Belle wants “adventure in the great wide somewhere.” The tradition goes all the way back to Snow White, singing “Someday My Prince Will Come.” You can chart the progress of women in America by the things Disney heroines sing about in their “I Want” songs.”

— Emily Nagoski

189. “Andrew paused in moving a microphone cable, considered for a moment, and nodded. He said, “Yeah. I really am.” Redefining winning made the recording session far less agonizing. But better still, a year later, when the group met again, several singers approached Amelia privately to tell her, “That Monitor thing? That’s changed, like, my whole life.”

— Emily Nagoski

190. “Pleasure happens when we feel safe enough. Trusting enough, healthy enough, welcome enough, at low-enough risk.”

— Emily Nagoski

191. “You may do all the things you’re supposed to do, without getting where you’re trying to go, only to end up somewhere else pretty amazing.”

— Emily Nagoski

192. “One thing we know for sure doesn’t work: just telling yourself that everything is okay now. Completing the cycle isn’t an intellectual decision; it’s a physiological shift. Just.”

— Emily Nagoski

193. “Your task, as a partnership, is to explore ways to co-create a shared context – a shared life, a connection, a state of mind, a way of being together – that makes pleasure easy to access.”

— Emily Nagoski

194. “Great! Just notice any apparently causeless emotions or sensations or trembling and say, “Ah. There’s some Feels.”

— Emily Nagoski

195. “Anyway, our fellow apes eat insects out of each other’s fur; maybe bath bombs and body glitter are the modern human equivalent.”

— Emily Nagoski

196. “All she had to do to accept their help was let go of her impulse to be in control and make everything perfect.”

— Emily Nagoski

197. “We might do these things when we don’t know how to complete the cycle or when the feelings just hurt too much.”

— Emily Nagoski

198. “Our stressors are lower intensity and longer duration – “chronic stressors,” they’re called, in contrast to “acute stressors,” like straightforward predation.”

— Emily Nagoski

199. “If you carry a purse laden with the complete contents of a drugstore, you already know about planful problem-solving. If you write lists, keep calendars, or follow a budget, you know what planful problem-solving entails. It does what it says on the label: you analyze the problem, you make a plan based on your analysis, and then you execute the plan.”

— Emily Nagoski

200. “And if pleasure always is pleasurable but desire is only sometimes pleasurable, doesn’t it make sense to center pleasure, and allow desire to emerge in contexts that maximize the chances that the desire will feel good?”

— Emily Nagoski