The greatest act of self-love is to no longer accept a life you are unhappy with. It is to be able to state the problem plainly and in a straightforward manner.

Self-love is about participating in healthy environments that grow you and nourish you. It is also about cutting yourself off from evil and energy-draining environments that kill you slowly.

Self-love is the balance between accepting yourself as you are while knowing that you deserve better and working towards it.

The understanding of self-love that makes the most sense to me is much more internal. It is the way you relate to yourself with compassion, honesty, and openness. It is meeting every part of yourself with unconditional acceptance, from the parts that you find easy to love, to the rough and imperfect parts that you try to hide from. Self-love begins with acceptance, but it does not stop there. Real self-love is a total embrace of all that you are while simultaneously acknowledging that you have room to grow and much to let go of.

Self-love is about knowing everything about yourself, however ugly or dark or bad your truth is, and accepting yourself with it. Self-love is about knowing how to transform your flaws into your strengths rather than hiding them inside you so that no one can see them. Self-love is about choosing yourself every single day to study your patterns, examine your behavior, knowing your thoughts (even if they are mean at times). Self-love is about creating a home deep inside you where you can be YOU without worrying about healing, pretending, or perfectionism. You are beautiful with your dark side not by hiding them under the mask of goodness.

self-love is a sincere
acceptance of the past
an agreement to make
the most of the present
and a willingness to allow
the best to occur in the future

Real self-love is a total embrace of all that you are while simultaneously acknowledging that you have room to grow and much to let go of.

self-love is doing the work we need to do to be free

Giving love to others and not expecting it back is also a form of self-love.

do not confuse self-love with thinking that you’re better than everyone else true self-love is accepting yourself for all that you are, especially the darkest parts

"One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.

He says, Love yourself . . . This can become the foundation of a radical transformation. Don’t be afraid of loving yourself. Love totally, and you will be surprised: The day you can get rid of all self-condemnation, self-disrespect — the day you can get rid of the idea of original sin, the day you can think of yourself as worthy and loved by existence — will be a day of great blessing. From that day onward you will start seeing people in their true light, and you will have compassion. And it will not be a cultivated compassion; it will be a natural, spontaneous flow.

Self-love is the foundation for your capacity to love the other person. If you don’t take good care of yourself, if you are not happy, if you are not peaceful, you cannot make the other person happy. You cannot help the other person; you cannot love. Your capacity for loving another person depends entirely on your capacity for loving yourself, for taking care of yourself.

Improving yourself and your life is also self-love, because it means you recognize that you deserve more than settling for mediocrity.