It’s never easy to love yourself without feeling guilty or selfish.
Every time you wish to indulge in self-love, a flood of conflicting emotions rushes in. Your mind travels back to times when you did things you could never tell anyone.
No matter how many beautiful acts have occurred since, your judgments of those mistakes prevent you from loving yourself. You are quick to criticize yourself for those times, perhaps rather too harshly than you should.
But you forget that you’re human, and humans make mistakes.
Self-love is appreciating the goodness and the humanness in yourself. It is about being gentle in embracing your flaws and fragility. And about never forgetting how beautiful, honest, and unique you are!
Loving yourself doesn’t mean you gloss over your past wrongs. Instead, it means you’ve accepted them and now have a healthy and joyful relationship with yourself. It means you can love yourself as much as you do your best friend.
According to psychologists, self-love is a mix of self-esteem, self-acceptance, and self-compassion.
✶ This post is a part of our series on Powerful Quotes For Her. You should check out another one: Self-Esteem Quotes For Women.
50 Self-Love Quotes For Girls And Women (And Others Too!)
The first rule of self-love is that you must never put yourself last in line to meet the needs of others. Keep in mind the following message from Janis Joplin, the first lady of rock ‘n’ roll:
▪ Don’t compromise yourself. You’re all you’ve got.
You’re already precious and worth many times over a million bucks. Now feel more empowered and energized with these 50 self-love quotes to strengthen your indomitable spirit:
1. Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world. — Lucille Ball
2. Self-love seems so often unrequited. — Anthony Powell
3. To fall in love with yourself is the first secret to happiness. — Robert Morely
4. Know who you are. Know what you want. Know what you deserve. And don’t settle for less. — Tony Gaskins
5. Love yourself enough to set boundaries. Your time and energy are precious. You get to choose how you use it. You teach people how to treat you by deciding what you will and won’t accept. — Anna Taylor
6. Be gentle with yourself, learn to love yourself, to forgive yourself, for only as we have the right attitude toward ourselves can we have the right attitude toward others. — Wilfred Peterson
7. If you aren’t good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you’ll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren’t even giving to yourself. — Barbara De Angelis
8. If you can learn to love yourself and all the flaws, you can love other people so much better. And that makes you so happy. — Kristin Chenoweth
9. No other love, no matter how genuine it is, can fulfill one’s heart better than unconditional self-love. — Edmond Mbiaka
10. In order to love who you are, you cannot hate the experience that shaped you. — Andrea Dykstra
11. Self-love is rising above the perfectionist standards you have set for yourself. It is accepting that you are human and make mistakes just like any other person. So start being real, and stop being perfect. — H.I.P.
12. Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions. — Pema Chodron
13. Self-love is respecting and practicing your right to be happy. It’s also giving yourself a smile and a hand each time you fall down. — H.I.P.
14. To fall in love with yourself is the first secret to happiness. — Robert Morley
15. Love is the great miracle cure. Loving ourselves works miracles in our lives. — Louise L. Hay
16. There are plenty of places in which you will face rejection; the mirror… should not be one of them. — N.R. Shephard
17. To accept ourselves as we are means to value our imperfections as much as our perfections. — Sandra Bierig
18. If there’s one thing I’m willing to bet on, it’s myself. — Beyonce
19. You have to learn to get up from the table when love is no longer being served. — Nina Simone
20. Embrace the glorious mess that you are. — Elizabeth Gilbert (author of the 10-million-copies bestseller Eat, Pray, Love)
21. If you have the ability to love, love yourself first. — Charles Bukowski
22. I am mine. Before I am EVER anyone else’s. — Nayyirah Waheed
23. Love yourself instead of abusing yourself. — Karolina Kurkova
24. When a woman becomes her own best friend life is easier. — Diane Von Furstenberg
25. Self-love begins when we observe our actions and words with compassion as if we were our own best friend. — Sara M Bosworth
26. Often we are reluctant to promote self-love mostly because we confuse it with selfishness. Since we are humans, we ought to have a healthy love for ourselves; it is from this fount that love flows out to others. — Mason Olds
27. You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection. — Buddha
28. To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. — Oscar Wilde
29. I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do. — Brené Brown
30. Loving yourself makes it easier to love others. You can’t truly love another until you know how to love yourself. — H.I.P.
31. To love yourself right now, just as you are, is to give yourself heaven. Don’t wait until you die. If you wait, you die now. If you love, you live now. — Alan Cohen
32. Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself. — Harvey Fierstein
33. You can’t pour from an empty cup. Take care of yourself first. — Norm Kelly
34. Love yourself unconditionally, just as you love those closest to you despite their faults. — Les Brown
35. I don’t like myself, I’m crazy about myself. — May West
36. Eat like you love yourself. Move like you love yourself. Speak like you love yourself. Act like your love yourself. Love yourself. — Tara Stiles
37. You have to believe in yourself when no one else does – that makes you a winner right here. — Venus Williams, the only tennis player to have won a medal at four Olympic Games.
38. A girl should be two things: who and what she wants. — Coco Chanel
39. Never dull your shine for somebody else. — Tyra Banks
40. Choose every day to forgive yourself. You are human, flawed, and most of all worthy of love. — Alison Malee
41. You carry so much love in your heart. Give some to yourself. — r.z.
42. Be yourself. No one can say you’re doing it wrong. — Charles M. Schulz
43. Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind. — Bernard M. Baruch
44. Life … puts you in touch with people you need to meet — to help you, to hurt you, to leave you, to love you, and to gradually strengthen you into the person you were meant to become. — Robert Tew
45. How you love yourself is how you teach others to love you. — Rupi Kaur
46. About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won’t like you at all. — Rita Mae Brown
48. Who will you love if not yourself? … You will not love anyone or anything until those eyes in the mirror soften up and embrace the beauty that is already within. — Vironika Tugaleva
49. So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. — Jorge Luis Borges
50. I have so much love in my heart to give; I have to remember to save some for myself. — Ericka Leigh
So, girls and women (and others too!), if you need some inspiration to be in love with yourself one more time, here is the ride to take you there — a cute little video we made:
More Inspiring Quotes On Loving Yourself
▪ You were born with a right to be happy. Self-love is respecting and practicing that right for your happiness and wellbeing.
▪ Self-love is calling yourself by name and saying, “Hey lovely lady, I love you for who you are, exactly as you are!”
▪ Loving yourself is like being a great friend to yourself. Always remember, you are that one friend who will never leave you — so why not be your own BFF (best friend forever)?
▪ To love yourself more, you need to set yourself free from any conditions. True self-love is unconditional.
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▪ If you’re searching for that one person that will change your life, take a look in the mirror.
▪ You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
▪ You know you’re in self-love when you see your reflection, and it makes you smile. Why don’t you do that more often?
▪ To love yourself fully, you have to forgive yourself first. Once you make peace with your past, you’ll find a more lovable self in the present.
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▪ Those who love themselves know to set limits and say no to activities and relationships that drain them physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
▪ Self-love means not settling for less than you deserve. Compassion, kindness, happiness — you deserve a lot more of these for yourself than for others.
▪ When you compare yourself to others, you actually suffocate your ability to love yourself.
▪ You can’t find a chance of loving yourself if you’re always criticizing yourself. Self-criticism and self-love can’t live in the same house.
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▪ Self-love is not selfish. You can love yourself while also loving others. It’s not a zero-sum game.
(A zero-sum game is a relationship, competition, or transaction in which one person’s gain is the other person’s loss. A non-zero-sum is when both parties get to win something.)
▪ Self-love is getting ready and looking good just for yourself, even when you know there’s no one to see you in person.
▪ Self-love is investing time and resources to educate and grow yourself. Give yourself the gift of knowledge.
▪ You don’t need to love everything about yourself to have self-love; loving yourself is first about accepting yourself completely.
▪ People who love themselves always know exactly what they want for themselves. – Anon
A Few Words On Self-Love
Never feel guilty about loving yourself.
We are tough on ourselves whenever the result of an effort falls short of our expectations. Instead, we should handle those failures by praising our efforts and showing ourselves some love.
At other times, self-doubt takes the place of self-esteem. It becomes even more difficult to embrace ourselves for who we are, exactly as we are. Again, what we need in those times in our life is some self-love.
You can pursue your goals with more passion and determination when you love yourself. However, if you fail, you never mistreat or punish yourself.
By the way, self-love and narcissism are not the same things. Narcissism is toxic to yourself and others. But self-love makes you happy and satisfied. It also opens the door to giving others your love.
Self-love means forgiving yourself, with deep love and empathy, as you would do with the most loved people in your life. But what we do in actual life is altogether different.
Self-love is no more a luxury—it is a necessity. In challenging times, you are first your own person before anyone else. If you fall out of favor with yourself, then all those who depend on you will suffer along with you.
When you connect to the rest of your world through screens, it is more crucial that you also connect to yourself with deep love. Then you can keep growing your resilience muscle.
With a healthy amount of self-love, you can treat yourself with the same amount of care and respect as you do with your loved ones. Self-love will help you wake up happier in the mornings and make your relationships more fulfilling.
Finally, understand that the reason to love ourselves is this:
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
✶This post is a part of our series on Powerful Quotes For Her. You should check out another one: Self-Esteem Quotes For Women.
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• Learn to relax by calming your Vagus nerve!
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Author Bio: Written and reviewed by Sandip Roy—a medical doctor, psychology writer, and happiness researcher. Founder and Chief Editor of The Happiness Blog. Writes popular science articles on happiness, positive psychology, and related topics.
• Our story: Happiness India
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