Top 200 Emily Nagoski Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “But then, when women start to think concretely about it, they begin to discover a sense that they need their self-criticism in order to stay motivated. We believe it does us good to torture ourselves, at least a little bit. As in: “If I stop beating myself up for the ways I’m not perfect, that’s like admitting to the world – and to myself – that I’ll never be perfect, that I’m permanently inadequate! I need my self-criticism in order to maintain hope and to motivate myself to get better.”

— Emily Nagoski

152. “Meaning is not made by the terrible thing you experienced; it is made by the ways you survive.”

— Emily Nagoski

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski

156. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

159. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

174. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski

185. “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

186. “Concrete. Specific. Detailed.”

— Emily Nagoski

187. “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

188. “Choose what feels right for you and ignore what doesn’t feel right.”

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

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

— Emily Nagoski

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “Attachment is love.”

— Emily Nagoski

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

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

— Emily Nagoski