38 Inspiring Body Image Quotes

In today's digital age, the concept of body image has become increasingly significant, influencing how individuals perceive themselves and others. Our perception of our bodies can profoundly impact our mental and emotional well-being, making it essential to nurture a positive body image. To support this journey of self-love and acceptance, we've curated a collection of 38 inspiring body image quotes. These empowering words from diverse voices aim to celebrate the beauty of all shapes, sizes, and forms. Whether you're seeking motivation, comfort, or a gentle reminder of your worth, these quotes promise to uplift and inspire you on your path to embracing your true self.

1. “...compulsive eating is basically a refusal to be fully alive. No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can't stand it any longer, we binge. The way we are able to accomplish all of this is by the simple act of bolting -- of leaving ourselves -- hundreds of times a day.” - Geneen Roth

2. “Weight (too much or too little) is a by-product. Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life. Even with aching joints, it's not about food. Even with arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure. It's about your desire to flatten your life. It's about the fact that you've given up without saying so. It's about your belief that it's not possible to live any other way -- and you're using food to act that out without ever having to admit it. (p. 53)” - Geneen Roth

3. “You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won't discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself. (p. 84)” - Geneen Roth

4. “When you ignore your belly, you become homeless. You spend your life trying to erase your own existence. Apologizing for yourself. Feeling like a ghost. Eating to take up space, eating to give yourself the feeling that you have weight here, you belong here, you are allowed to be yourself -- but never quite believing it because you don't sense yourself directly.. . . I started teaching a simple belly meditation in which I asked people to become aware of sensations in their belly (numbness and emptiness count as sensations). Every time their mind wandered . . . I asked them to begin counting their breaths so they could anchor their concentration. Starting with the number one and saying it on the out breath, they'd count to seven and begin again. If they were able to stay concentrated on the sensations in their belly centers, they didn't need to use counting as a concentration anchor.. . . you begin the process of bringing yourself back to your body, to your belly, to your breath because they -- not the mind medleys -- are here now. And it is only here, only now that you can make a decision to eat or not eat. To occupy your own body or to vacate your arms and your legs while still breathing and go through your days as a walking head. . . . Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. A way to discover what you love. A practice to return yourself to your body when the mind medleys threaten to usurp your sanity.” - Geneen Roth

5. “It's never been true, not anywhere at any time, that the value of a soul, of a human spirit, is dependent on a number on a scale. We are unrepeatable beings of light and space and water who need these physical vehicles to get around. When we start defining ourselves by that which can be measured or weighed, something deep within us rebels. We don't want to EAT hot fudge sundaes as much as we want our lives to BE hot fudge sundaes. We want to come home to ourselves. (p. 174-5)” - Geneen Roth

6. “That’s sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something…real.” Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. “Real love, real friends, real body parts…” - Jess C. Scott

7. “It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.” - Stephen Fry

8. “A fit, healthy body—that is the best fashion statement” - Jess C. Scott

9. “There is nothing more rare, nor more beautiful, than a woman being unapologetically herself; comfortable in her perfect imperfection. To me, that is the true essence of beauty.” - Steve Maraboli

10. “Women get boob jobs to give themselves a certain edge. Frankly, I don't see why they nearly kill themselves trying to diet off their equally bulbous hips.” - Kim Brittingham

11. “Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.” - Naomi Wolf

12. “Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken.” - Naomi Wolf

13. “If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community.” - Naomi Wolf

14. “Eating is not a crime. It’s not a moral issue. It’s normal. It’s enjoyable. It just is.” - Carrie Arnold

15. “Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.” - Germaine Greer

16. “Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced "beautiful" images? Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that "justify" the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An idealogy that makes women feel "worth less" was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth.” - Naomi Wolf

17. “Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women's freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation -- latent fears that we might be going too far.” - Naomi Wolf

18. “Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.” - Naomi Wolf

19. “Be patient. Your skin took a while to deteriorate. Give it some time to reflect a calmer inner state. As one of my friends states on his Facebook profile: "The true Losers in Life, are not those who Try and Fail, but those who Fail to Try.” - Jess C. Scott

20. “In all the years I've been a therapist, I've yet to meet one girl who likes her body.” - Mary Pipher

21. “Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.” - Naomi Wolf

22. “The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition.” - Naomi Wolf

23. “The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.” - Naomi Wolf

24. “Men are visually aroused by women's bodies and less sensitive to their arousal by women's personalities because they are trained early into that response, while women are less visually aroused and more emotionally aroused because that is their training. This asymmetry in sexual education maintains men's power in the myth: They look at women's bodies, evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over. But there is no "rock called gender" responsible for that; it can change so that real mutuality--an equal gaze, equal vulnerability, equal desire--brings heterosexual men and women together.” - Naomi Wolf

25. “Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want women who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life.Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage, its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.” - Naomi Wolf

26. “For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. Nothing comparable has ever happened in the history of our species; it dislodges Freud. Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank females torsos in women's magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.” - Naomi Wolf

27. “Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.” - Naomi Wolf

28. “What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.” - Naomi Wolf

29. “You know you've got problems when your head is hanging over the toilet, puking up your dinner, and what you're thinking of is your dad. And how he thinks you're not pretty.” - Teresa Lo

30. “Sometimes I look in the mirror and think I'm really good looking. Then other times I think my body's all wrong.” - Alex Sanchez

31. “Beauty shouldn’t be about changing yourself to achieve an ideal or be more socially acceptable. Real beauty, the interesting, truly pleasing kind, is about honoring the beauty within you and without you. It’s about knowing that someone else’s definition of pretty has no hold over you.” - Golda Poretsky

32. “Why, my goodness, honey. After looking at all those pictures of seraphic and perspirationless babes for so long in the privacy of a foxhole, what is a poor doughfoot going to do when he comes home and discovers that American women are, after all, biological and given, under stress, to shiny noses?” - Margaret Mitchell

33. “We’ve been told prettiness will somehow make us better—and more loved. Do we really want to bear the mark of physical beauty? Or do we just want to be loved?” - Kate Wicker

34. “The good news is that there is one kind of food you can never have too much of. The best way to fully recover from a food addiction or body-image problem is to fill up on the Lord.” - Kate Wicker

35. “You are a beloved child of God. But please remember this, too: You are human. You cannot expect to eat perfectly, look perfect, or be perfect. When you stumble, pick yourself up, even if you have to do it again and again.” - Kate Wicker

36. “it's not his bodythat changesright away.it's somethinginside. he sayshe wants tobe a littleweaker. i don'tunderstand.i say 'thinner?'and he says'no, i wantto be strongerin a differentway.' notbecause of me,but for me.” - David Levithan

37. “I've got two backs, me - and I'm glad! Tits can be . . . mwa, I know, but they're always in the bloody road. Even in bed.” - Martin Amis

38. “I keep telling you, nobody wants legs like a stick insect. They want a bottom they can park in a bike in and balance a pint of beer on.” - Helen Fielding