The Art of Talking to Yourself Quotes

“No tree tries to become a certain kind of tree. No flower tries to become a certain kind of flower. The tree and the flower open up to the sun and soak up water. Thus, they grow into themselves. No judgment. No expectations. No commentary. Your task is the same. If you can stop trying so hard to become who you think you should be, and instead commit to understanding and nourishing yourself, you will bloom into whatever kind of person you are.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“To know yourself, you must sacrifice the illusion that you already do.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“When you love people, you are curious about who they are, what they think, and how they feel. You watch them closely, wondering about their experience and what you can do to make it more enjoyable. You feel compassion for their pain and seek to make it more bearable. You are eager to learn the unique language of their existence. You want to under-stand them, inspire them, heal them. What if you could look at yourself this way?”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“One thing is for sure—you will make mistakes. Learn to learn from them. Learn to forgive yourself. Learn to laugh when everything falls apart because, sometimes, it will.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“You don’t need to wait for someone else to notice your talents before nourishing them. You don’t need others to accept you to feel accepted. You don’t need to wait. You can begin, at any moment, to work on noticing, nourishing, and accepting yourself. You can work on being a better friend to your reflection. You can start listening to yourself like you wish other people would. You can become curious about who you are. You can begin to learn the language of your mind and body so that you can decode it, understand it, speak it. You can work on understanding yourself instead of always trying to make yourself into someone else.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“As you dig your teeth into your assumptions, your teeth become sharper. You can dig deeper. You become what the world needs simply by helping yourself. It’s not easy, but it is worth it. The truth, as they say, hurts. But they also say it sets you free.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“Within you is a fountain of wisdom. And you sell yourself short every time you allow some authority to define your limitations and cage your potential. Even if that authority lives in your head.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“One particularly harmful idea carried by our cultural narrative is that you need to find someone who will love you. Imagine if we believed this about any other basic need: food, water, oxygen. If you needed another person to provide you with those, you’d be considered dependent—if not disabled. Yet we so willingly put ourselves in this state with love.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“You’re already stuck with yourself for a lifetime. Why not improve this relationship?”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“Hope for the future lies in each of us looking within. By learning to feed your hunger, you can overcome the tempting illusions all around you. By discovering who you are, you can stop basing your self-image solely on other people’s ideas about you. By connecting to your inner strength, you can stop cycling between idealistic illusions and self-hating disillusionment. By taking responsibility for yourself, you can stop relying on others to take responsibility for you.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“Instead of labelling your emotions as problems to solve, you can see them as signals to interpret. Instead of judging your desires as shameful aberrations, you can learn to meet them in healthier ways. Instead of calling yourself critical names when you cannot build or break certain habits, you can explore your motivations. You can become a student of yourself rather than always seeking a wiser teacher.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“Self-understanding is a lifetime endeavour. It is not a weekend seminar. It does not come in capsule form.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“Only you can allow yourself to explore the person in the mirror. Only you can coax yourself into a daring adventure to find your untapped potential.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“Remember that when things don't go according to plan, they go according to truth. No matter how painful the reality, it is reality nonetheless. There is dignity in facing the truth without trying to cut it down to a more manageable size. There is honour in acceptance.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“The sooner we heal our traumas, the sooner we liberate ourselves from the people who hurt us. By hating them, we hold onto them. We cannot heal.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“Each moment of self-honesty builds intimacy, trust, and compassion. The more you look, the more you’ll love.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“Some people say they don’t believe in God, but they believe in an energy that moves through all living things. Others say they do believe in God, and they claim God is an energy moving through all living things. Some people believe in a holy book, and their faith gives them the same feeling of certainty that sustains people of other faiths as well as non-believers. Over this, we start wars.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“When we listen to ourselves with callous objectivity—trying to diagnose and eradicate our problems with effective solutions—this “listening” rarely works. Think of the people who treat you this way: those who can’t see beyond their labels and judgments of you. Those who only “listen” for long enough to decide which advice to give you. It feels horrible. This same attitude prevents us from hearing our inner conversations. When we feel like someone has an agenda, we resist. Trying to fix ourselves while pretending to love ourselves doesn’t work. We don’t heal through objectification. We heal through understanding. We need to feel appreciated by the people who help us—ourselves included.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“I believe that the most tragic war of our time is the one within—a war between what we knew as children and what we’ve learned as adults. A war between wisdom and intelligence. A war between the natural colour of our hair and the colour we chemically impose upon it. A war between the manicured hedges and the untouched wilderness. A war between reality and fairy tales. A war between what we could learn about the world and what we are systematically taught. A war that can end in peace.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“It all comes back to curiosity. We live in a society that objectifies us as sexual objects and status symbols. We learn to flatten ourselves and others into little words: good and bad, ugly and pretty, right and wrong, lovable and unlovable. Then, we try to discover who we are through these labels. It doesn’t work. Because a human being is more than a signpost onto which we can plaster our judgments. A person is more than a sack of flesh to lose, keep, or throw away. A human being cannot be packaged into a stale idea. A person must be experienced to be known, and this knowledge ends the moment you stop looking. Each one of us is a mystery. And the more aware you become, the more mysterious it gets. The reward for seeking truth is not the truth itself. The gift is wonder. The gift is love.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“A person who doesn’t understand flowers might tug on them to make them grow. A person who doesn’t speak the language of someplace might misread the locals’ sentiments and intentions. Yet you are already such a flower, and your inner locals—your emotions, your body, your thoughts—are already speaking to you. If you don’t learn the language of your experience, then how can you understand yourself? How can you help yourself?”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“Trying to fix ourselves while pretending to love ourselves doesn’t work. We don’t heal through objectification. We heal through understanding. We need to feel appreciated by the people who help us—ourselves included.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“Some people engage in retail therapy, buying new things to make themselves feel more secure, and others engage in knowledge therapy, amassing new ideas to make themselves feel like they know something. We consume for comfort. We rely on certainty to shield us from the pain of confusion. The truth is staggering, colossal, unfathomable, so we cling to our bite-sized lies. We organize knowledge into bulleted lists and line graphs while the wisdom of the present moment sits patiently at the doors of our perception.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“When you love people, you are curious about who they are, what they think, and how they feel. You watch them closely, wondering about their experience and what you can do to make it more enjoyable. You feel compassion for their pain and seek to make it more bearable. You are eager to learn the unique language of their existence. You want to understand them, inspire them, heal them. What if you could look at yourself this way?”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“You have never been flawed. You have never been broken. Rather, you have misunderstood yourself.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“When curiosity is an end in itself—a perspective, a viewpoint, a way of life—then it fuels an easy, egoless, playful relationship between ourselves and the world around us.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“A child does not decide to be open-minded. As a self-aware adult, you make conscious choices. You earn back your right to be free, to play, to exist without struggling.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“As you engage in daily self-nourishment, you will become less vulnerable to promises of quick fixes and magical solutions. A well-fed person is hard to seduce.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“You will promote harmony in your words and actions. You will not compete with other leaders or compare to them. You will work together with others to make meaningful changes. You will not measure success in numbers: dollars, followers, ranks, sales, reviews, Facebook likes. Rather, you will measure by people helped, connections made, and moments savoured. You will help people accept themselves by being real with them. You will not show up on the pulpit for attention or approval. You will show up because you have something important to say. You will build tribes instead of cults. You will see your followers as equals. You will learn with them, and they will trust you. And there is nothing like the trust of people who resonate with your most authentic, vulnerable self to push you, every day, to do your best. It will hold you to a higher standard of behaviour. As a self-aware leader, you can be honest. This is the missing element in so many ineffective and addictive doctrines. You can tell people the things that are true but hard to hear. Not everyone will be brave enough to sidestep idealism, but those who do will appreciate your honesty. If you do not describe the darkness and the light, the voyager who has followed in your footsteps will believe he is lost. He will blame himself or blame you for teaching him lies. By being honest about what the journey looks like—failures, warts, and all—your teachings will become sources of consolation rather than frustration. As that voyager travels down the crooked, lonely paths within him, he may find a dark, terrifying cave, but if you mentioned it, he will feel elated. Yes, he will think, it looks horrifying, but at least I’m on track if I’ve found this awful thing. Your honesty may be bitter medicine, but when it digests, it’ll provide such potent healing that its taste will become a distant memory.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself

“Meaning is something we ascribe to things in order to understand them. Reality itself is meaningless. Once this jagged, little pill digests within us, it unlocks a beautiful gift: free will.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Art of Talking to Yourself