Jane Drinkard

50 Quotes From Badass Women That Will Inspire You To Love Yourself As You Are

Read these when you're sick of condescending men
Jane Drinkard
June 8, 2016
“I never used to be bothered by how small I was. 
Then something happened… and I was. 
Then I fell in love with myself again, and I wasn’t bothered anymore. 
I never will be again.”
— Quinta Brunson, Tumblr
Tagged: feminism, Self-Love, Loving Yourself, Self-Image, Independence
“I'm tough, I'm ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.”
— Madonna, People
Tagged: feminism, Bitch, Loving Yourself, Self-Love, Women
“Wake up, decide to be confident, and then do it.”
— Kendra Syrdal, How To Be Confident
Tagged: Confidence, Self-Love, Self-Image, Self-Worth, Love Yourself, Put Yourself First
“I am a woman with thoughts and questions and shit to say. I say if I’m beautiful. I say if I’m strong. You will not determine my story — I will.”
— Amy Schumer, Gloria Awards
Tagged: feminism, Self-Worth, Self-Love, Putting Yourself First, Owning Yourself
“If you can't laugh at yourself, life is going to seem a whole lot longer than you'd like.”
— Natalie Portman, Garden State
Tagged: humor, Laughter, Loving Yourself, Laughing At Yourself, Self-Love
“Here is how you walk away from him: you get up, flick your hair, sashay away and never look back.”
— Kat George, Here Is How You Walk Away From Him
Tagged: Moving On, Breaking Up, Exes, Leaving, Goodbyes, feminism, Self-Love
“You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947
Tagged: Fear, Imbibe, Fullness, Born Of Excess, Expansion, Creation, Experience
“Women need to shift from thinking 'I’m not ready to do that' to thinking 'I want to do that— and I’ll learn by doing it.'”
— Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
Tagged: Self-Help, You're Ready
“'Done is better than perfect.' I have tried to embrace this motto and let go of unattainable standards. Aiming for perfection causes frustration at best and paralysis at worst.”
— Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
Tagged: Perfectionism, Done Is Better Than Perfect
“You may write me down in history 
with your bitter, twisted lies. 
You may trod me in the very dirt 
but still, like dust, I’ll rise.”
— Maya Angelou, Still I Rise
Tagged: feminism, strength, Self love, Poetry, Spilled Ink, Inspirational, Girl Power
“Remember that you were art long before he came to admire you, and you'll continue to be art even when he's gone.”
— Charlotte Geier, via Tumblr
Tagged: After Him, After Love, Moving On, Letting Go, You Are Art, Self-Love
“The minute you learn to love yourself, you would not want to be anybody else.”
— Rihanna, From Her Speech At The 2016 BET Awards
Tagged: Self love, Inspirational, Confidence, Girl Power, Body Positive, Finding Yourself, Self Discovery
“If you're going to wear a dress like that you need to wear it with confidence. You need to fill it out mentally as well as physically.”
— Jojo Moyes, Me Before You
Tagged: Love, Confidence, Self-Love, beauty
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt,, This is My Story
Tagged: Confidence, Self-Love
“Do your thing and don't care if they like it.”
— Tina Fey, Bossypants
Tagged: Be yourself, Confidence, Self-Love
“The conclusion we drew from this convinced us that it was best to do everything on purpose, deliberately, so that you would know what to expect.”
— Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend: Neapolitan Novels, Book One
Tagged: purpose, Chance, Expectations, Uncertainty
“Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence. She knew how to go beyond the limit without ever truly suffering the consequences. In the end people gave in, and were even, however unwillingly, compelled to praise her.”
— Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend: Neapolitan Novels, Book One
Tagged: strength, fragility, Limitations, Womanhood
“I fell in love with myself and I thought about what makes me, I am just like a flower that needs watering to grow. I learned to nurture myself in every way. I love myself for all the good that I see and accept my flaws and the fact that I am imperfect. This does not mean that I do not learn to change from my shortcomings; instead, I am being gentle and kind to myself despite all my flaws.”
— Denise Small, My Story I'm Still Standing
Tagged: Self-Love, Loving Yourself, Embracing Yourself, I Am A Flower, Loving Myself Despite Flaws
“I think if you feel like you were born to write, then you probably were.”
— Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl
Tagged: write, Destiny, Calling, self
“Encourage yourself, believe in yourself, and love yourself. Never doubt who you are.”
— Stephanie Lahart, Overcoming Life's Obstacles: Enlighten-Encourage-Empower
Tagged: Hard Work, Dreams, Self-Love
“What would you do if you weren't afraid?”
— Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
Tagged: Dreams, Motivational
“An amazing thing happens when you stop seeking approval and validation: You find it. People are naturally drawn like magnets to those who know who they are and cannot be shaken.”
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman
Tagged: Approval, Validation, Self-Love, Self-Acceptance, Independence
“I went out with a guy who once told me I didn’t need to drink to make myself more fun to be around. I told him, I’m drinking so that you’re more fun to be around.”
— Chelsea Handler, Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea
Tagged: Womanhood, humor, Relationships, How To Be Single Again, Single Life, Being Single, Single People Problems
“But here’s the deal, sweet stranger. You deserve to be the protagonist of your own wonderful, bizarre, terrifying little life. If you decide you are enough, you are enough. You don’t need to wait for some grand external validation of your worth before you offer your kindest heart to yourself.”
— Kathy Brown, A Letter To The Woman Who Won’t Buy Herself Flowers
Tagged: Selfish, Self-Love, Being Selfish, Loving Yourself
“Don’t do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to do. Don’t stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don’t fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight. Don’t focus on the short-term fun instead of the long-term fall out. Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore. Don’t seek joy at all costs. I know it’s hard to know what to do when you have a conflicting set of emotions and desires, but it’s not as hard as we pretend it is. Saying it’s hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do—have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly. I don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself—as I did every damn time—the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, I’m learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that I’ve still got work to do.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Self-improvement, Self-awareness, Self-Love
“Once again she would arrive at a foreign place. Once again be the newcomer, an outsider, the one who did not belong. She knew from experience that she would quickly have to ingratiate herself with her new masters to avoid being rejected or, in more dire cases, punished. Then there would be the phase where she would have to sharpen her senses in order to see and hear as acutely as possible so that she could assimilate quickly all the new customs and the words most frequently used by the group she was to become a part of--so that finally, she would be judged on her own merits.”
— Laura Esquivel, Malinche: A Novel
Tagged: Growing Up, Womanhood, self, maturity
“Under all circumstances, we must never desert ourselves.”
— Louisa Adams, A Traveled First Lady: Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams
Tagged: self, Self-awareness, Truth, Life
“No satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
— Martha Graham, Blood Memory: An autobiography
Tagged: Art, Satisfaction, Artists, Life, curiousity
“Nothing can be truly replicated. Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line.”
— Patti Smith, M Train
Tagged: Love, beauty, replicate, Art
“ I think the great illusion of adulthood is that you’re going to get to this phase and be like ‘Oh, now I feel grounded and I feel like I know how to get from here to there.’ But that’s the thing with life. Maybe that’s so and then somebody gets sick and you have to deal with all the feelings that come up with that. Somebody cheats on you. You run out of money. You lose your job.”
— Anna Sale, Interview with Podcaster Anna Sale of Death, Sex & Money
Tagged: Adulthood, Myths, Illusions, Life, Surprises