Top 40 Luvvie Ajayi Jones Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Failure is life’s greatest teacher, and the only way we truly fail is to learn nothing from the valleys we experience.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

2. “When we want to say something and our voice shakes, we should take that to spur us forward, because that is when it is most necessary. Let your voice tremble, but say it anyway.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

3. “A professional troublemaker is someone who critiques the world, the shoddy systems, and the people who refuse to do better.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

4. “People have niceness and kindness mixed up. Niceness might mean saying positive things. But kindness is doing positive things: being thoughtful and considerate, prioritizing people’s humanity over everything else.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

5. “If we do not give ourselves permission to dream, how do we give ourselves permission to thrive? So give yourself the allowance to think about that thing that feels too big and too far to touch. Life’s adventures never promised a straight path, and that’s often what stops us. But we must dream. All we have, even in the worst moments, are the dreams of better things to come.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

6. “Owning your dopeness is not about being liked by others. It’s really about being liked by you first. One of my favorite proverbs is “When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm.” If you are strong in yourself, the actions of everyone else are less likely to move you.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

7. “A successful life is one lived on my own terms, not one where I end every day more tired than the last. And if everyone else around me is happy but I’m empty, then I have betrayed myself.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

8. “The things we must do are more significant than the things we are afraid to do.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

9. “Who we are should not be beholden to the moods of the people we are around, their insecurities, or their projections. Because when someone says you are too much, it is more of a statement on them than it is on you.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

10. “If the consequence is you get fired, is that an actual place you want to work? If you can get fired for challenging one idea in one meeting, is that company worth your time and energy? If the consequence is not that you’ll be fired or written up, then what is actually on the line if you speak up? Is it that you won’t be liked by whoever you challenged?”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

11. “I’ve learned that the audacity to speak my dreams out loud, even if only to myself, has taken me far. I marvel at how many times the things I have dared to say have come true. The things I have let myself dream about. I ask, not with entitlement, but with hope, and magical things have happened.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

12. “Instead, I think we should aspire to be kind. To be kind is to be generous, fair, honest, helpful, altruistic, gracious, tolerant, understanding, humble, giving, vulnerable, magnanimous, service-driven. To be nice is to smile a lot and be chatty with random strangers. Nice is talking about the weather. Kind is caring about whether someone has an umbrella in case it rains.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

13. “I’ve learned that gasping for air while volunteering to give others CPR is not heroic. It’s suffocation by resentment.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

14. “Know that grace and accountability can coexist. Grace makes you forgive yourself for your mistakes and accountability lets you know that the lesson learned must be remembered and those mistakes can’t be frequent.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

15. “When we dream, we’re giving others permission to do the same. When our dreams are big, we’re telling the folks who know us that they don’t have to be small either. When our dreams come true, we’re expanding the worlds of others because now they know theirs can too. We must dream and dream boldly and unapologetically.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

16. “Being accused of TOO MUCHness is to be told to take up less space. Being TOO much is to be excessive. How do you combat that? By being less than you are. And that concept feels like nothing other than self-betrayal. The inverse of too much is too little. I’d rather be too big than too small any day.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

17. “We are all fighting battles with the world, systems, ourselves. Battles that are easy to lose. It’s so much easier to keep doing what feels comfortable. What feels safe. But then we might look up one day and realize that we’ve safety-netted ourselves into lives that feel like cages. Cages can get comfortable, but comfort is overrated. Being quiet is comfortable. Keeping things the way they’ve been is comfortable. But all comfort does is maintain the status quo.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

18. “Spend your privilege.” She got it from disability rights advocate Rebecca Cokley. It is the concept that the privilege we have in this world is endless. It doesn’t run out. You don’t use your voice today and have to re-up the next day. Power is limitless, and using ours for other people does not diminish it.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

19. “Know that you have the right to have your preferences, your borders, your boundaries. Tell people outright that you prefer another type of behavior. Wear a T-shirt. Make PSAs. Use a hashtag. Feel no guilt about it. Prevent riffraffery and the enemies of progress from constantly piercing your territory. Build a wall to keep tomfoolery out. Draw your lines without guilt.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

20. “Don’t let people who can’t spell your name right tell you about who you are. Don’t let folks who only have courage behind a keyboard define your goodness or your worth as a person. Do not let people who are already rooting for you to falter insist on your value, because they will steer you wrong.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

21. “The communities we belong to are an important part of our identity. They TEACH us what is acceptable, respectable, or tolerable, from the way we dress to the music we listen to, to the things we consider our core beliefs. None of your friends smoke? Well, you’ll be less likely to. None of your friends have a master’s degree? Where do you even start if you want to get yours? All your friends dress like members of the Addams Family? Then your seersucker shorts will probably seem out of place.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

22. “To know ourselves is to write our values in cement even if our goals are in sand.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

23. “Even though people like to act fake-offended at the idea that they’re being judged, we know good and well that we are all judging each other. We just happen to critique each other on the wrong things, like what we look like, who we love, what deity we worship, if any. Instead, we should assess each other on how kind we are, how we’re showing up for other humans, and how we’re contributing to the world’s problems, large or small.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

24. “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” It is time for our actions to start proving the truth of our words.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

25. “Do not let people make you feel bad for being successful, and for being you, and for being amazing, and for being accomplished. If people get upset at you for announcing something you did, those people are not your people. Those people do not deserve your dopeness. And those people serve no important role in your life. Anyone who is upset that I’m doing well is an enemy of progress, and I don’t need them around me.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

26. “I am not fearless. But I’ve learned to start pushing past fear because oftentimes, the fear itself is scarier than whatever is on the other side. It’s like being afraid to walk through a dark hallway. If you close your eyes and run through it, you’ll be okay. And you’ll look back and say, “That wasn’t that bad.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

27. “Times of crisis and chaos present us with the opportunity to do the best work of our lives. People use words that they pull from the depths of their spirits. People paint with strokes that they summon from their souls. People sing notes that come from the cosmos. People innovate. We must keep doing that.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

28. “If we can’t put justice over niceness, what are we doing as a people? Where are we going to end up if we continue to turn the other cheek when somebody harms us? The people who harm us are not being told to be civil or nice or to take the high road. It’s always the person who’s been victimized in some way who is told to make that choice. Does that serve us? We’re going to be civil and we’re going to nice our way into bondage.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

29. “But the audacity to ask. It was everything. Ask for what you want. The universe might surprise you and say YES.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

30. “Facebook, for example, allows you to have five thousand friends. Just because that is the maximum doesn’t mean that is the number you should have. Just because your house can safely fit one hundred people in it doesn’t mean that is the number you should invite for dinner today. We don’t control a lot in life, but we can manage who we let into our physical and virtual spaces.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

31. “Women create and work in nonprofits because, as the nurturers, we say, “We want to help the world.” No, help yourself first, sis. And then help the world. Put your mask on first and all that jazz. I preach the gospel of us leaving the world better than we found it, but we also have to be able to leave ourselves better for it, not worse.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

32. “When we are afraid of having too much hope, we’re actually afraid of being disappointed. We are anxious about expecting the world to gift us and show us grace, because what if we end up on our asses? So we dream small or not at all. Because if we expect nothing or expect something small, we cannot be disappointed when the big things don’t happen.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

33. “OWE anyone your time, energy, or platform. Do not feel guilty about being protective of any of those things.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

34. “I realized then that one of my purposes is to make sure that I don’t have to see people behind me. If there are people behind me, I need to find a way to get them by my side.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

35. “Who am I expecting to do this work, if not me?”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

36. “Oftentimes, when we want something that doesn’t come with a manual, we are afraid of it, because we could lose our way since there’s no map. Well, maybe WE are supposed to draw the map, so someone who comes behind us won’t get lost. Create the map you didn’t have. That’s what I did. We must give ourselves permission to be who we want to be, even if we don’t have the blueprint yet, and that starts with dreaming.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

37. “It’s that quote from an old dead Greek dude, Heraclitus of Ephesus, come to life: “Change is the only constant in life.” Nobody has proven this wrong yet.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

38. “The things we must do are more significant than the things we are afraid to do. It doesn’t mean we don’t realize there are consequences. It means we acknowledge that they may come but we insist on keeping on.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

39. “You don’t civil your way to justice.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones

40. “Fear can very concretely keep us from doing and saying the things that are our purpose.”

— Luvvie Ajayi Jones