Top 200 Emily Nagoski Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski

154. “Pessimists, by contrast, don’t always expect good outcomes and may view bad things, if they happen, as symptomatic of larger-scale problems that could have lasting impact.”

— Emily Nagoski

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “Freeze happens when the brain assesses the threat and decides you’re too slow to run and too small to fight, and so your best hope for survival is to “play dead” until the threat goes away or someone comes along to help you. Freeze is your last-ditch stress response, reserved for threats that the brain perceives as life-threatening, when fight or flight don’t stand a chance.”

— Emily Nagoski

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski

167. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

170. “When she was happy and relaxed, she had one set of opinions about herself: self-confident and self-compassionate. When she was overwhelmed, she had an entirely different set of opinions about herself: self-critical and even self-abusive.”

— Emily Nagoski

171. “All because of a tiny shift in knowledge.”

— Emily Nagoski

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

176. “Physical activity is what tells your brain you have successfully survived the threat and now your body is a safe place to live. Physical activity is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle.”

— Emily Nagoski

177. “Being with the tribe doesn’t replace the Feels built into completing the cycle. We need to discharge the stress response, complete the cycle, before our bodies can move on.”

— Emily Nagoski

178. “Positive Social Interaction.”

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

180. “Attachment is love.”

— Emily Nagoski

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “You can chart the progress of women in America by the things Disney heroines sing about in their “I Want” songs.”

— Emily Nagoski

186. “There is and always will be a chasm between you and expected-you. What matters is not the size of the chasm or the nature of the chasm or anything else. What matters is how you manage it – which is to say, how you relate to your madwoman. 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

187. “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

188. “Only by making sure we have as much energy coming in as we have going out can we all stay committed to the people, work, and ideas we love.”

— Emily Nagoski

189. “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

190. “During President Barack Obama’s first term in office, his women staffers struggled so much to get their voices heard that they coordinated an “amplification” tactic, where when one of them made a key point, the others would repeat it, crediting the original speaker. Even President Obama, a self-declared feminist, needed active intervention to create gender balance.”

— Emily Nagoski

191. “Concrete. Specific. Detailed.”

— Emily Nagoski

192. “If you want to try using this principle rationally, all you have to do is write four lists: What are the benefits of continuing? What are the benefits of stopping? What are the costs of continuing? What are the costs of stopping?”

— Emily Nagoski

193. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski

195. “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

196. “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

197. “And then you look at those four lists and make a decision based on your estimates of maximizing benefit and minimizing cost. Remember to consider both the long-term and the short-term costs and benefits. And if you decide to continue, remember to include completing the cycle in your plan.”

— Emily Nagoski

198. “Meaning is often misunderstood as “the thing we’ll find at the end of the tunnel,” but it’s not. It’s why we go through the tunnel, regardless of what we find on the other end.”

— Emily Nagoski

199. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski