“Self-love is not the process of ignoring your flaws. Self-love is expanding your awareness to include your flaws and your strengths.”
“Love the art, poor as it may be, that thou hast learned, and be content with it; and pass through the rest of life like one who has intrusted to the gods with his whole soul all that he has, making thyself neither the tyrant nor the slave of any man.”
Source: Meditations
“There's no reason to assume that all men are bad. Not even all the soldiers are monsters.”
Source: The V Girl: A Coming of Age Story
“To build self-esteem, you have to outface your negative beliefs about yourself and change them.”
Source: You are Unique: Live your life as it suits you
“We survey lush landscapes with variations not dissimilar to a so-called "imperfect" female body with absolute pleasure -- say, an expanse of Irish countryside with grassy rolling hills. But is it really so much uglier when it's made of flesh instead of soil?”
Source: Read My Hips: How I Learned to Love My Body, Ditch Dieting, and Live Large
“Often in the morning he drove a long hour or more to the markets in the city, there to behold what would determine the day’s special. With the crates of fresh selesctions snuggled into his station wagon, his thoughts on the ride back confronted the culinary equivalent of the writer’s blank page. Sometimes his head swirled with exciting ideas; other mornings he was in a panic upon returning with the same old eggplant and squash and zucchini and nothing but the dullness of the word ratatouille standing by to mock him.”
Source: The Home Jar: Stories
“The truth was that she was terrified of these people and terrified of being rejected, and had decided that she would do nothing but believe passionately in fate. All those years at school learning about algebra and ox-bow lakes and not one lesson in self-esteem!”
Source: Only in America
“Some of us have been hiding, shrinking, betraying ourselves, faking the funk, and playing small for so long that we believe that we are small. That shrunken self is not you. That shrunken self is a persona you created to survive.”
Source: African Goddess Initiation: Sacred Rituals for Self-Love, Prosperity, and Joy
“When Africans were kidnapped, trafficked en masse and brutally dragged in chains to work camps in the “New World,” called plantations, we hid our deities and rituals in stories of saints, angels, and legendary characters. Our deities included a powerful cadre of orishas, abosom, lwas, álúsí, spirits, and god/desses. From South Africa to Sudan, Brazil to Cuba to even Indigenous Australia, we chant their names: Yemaya, Mami Wata, Atete, Iset, and Ala.”
Source: African Goddess Initiation: Sacred Rituals for Self-Love, Prosperity, and Joy
“There is no perfect time to start something.”