81 Inspiring Body Positivity Quotes

In a world where media and cultural standards often dictate narrow definitions of beauty, embracing body positivity is a powerful act of self-love and empowerment. Celebrating diverse shapes, sizes, and appearances, body positivity encourages us to love our bodies unapologetically and inspires profound personal and societal change. Whether you’re looking to uplift yourself or support others on their journey to self-acceptance, quotes can serve as poignant reminders of the beauty found in authenticity. Dive into our curated collection of 81 inspiring body positivity quotes that reaffirm your intrinsic worth, ignite your spirit, and remind you that true beauty radiates from self-confidence and self-acceptance.

1. “The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.” - Black Elk

2. “If I could put my brain in her body, the world would be mine for the taking.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

3. “Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?” - Charlotte Brontë

4. “You have to be able to center yourself, to let all of your emotions go. Don’t ever forget that you play with your soul as well as your body.” - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

5. “Euer Haus ist euer größerer Körper.” - Khalil Gibran

6. “I have said that the soul is not more than the body,And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's-self is,” - Walt Whitman

7. “As if one could do what one wanted with one's own body!” - Louis Aragon

8. “I drink to separate my body from my soul.” - Oscar Wilde

9. “Besides this I place another equally obvious confirmation of my view that opera is based on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man, the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of throughly unmusical hearers that before everything else the words must be understood, so that according to them a rebirth of music is to be expected only when some mode of singing has been discovered in which textword lords it over counterpoint like master over servant: For the words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

10. “[novan]: bassists are very good with their fingers[novan]: and some of us sing backup vocals, so that means we're good with our mouths too...(~ IM chat with Novan Chang, 18, bassist)” - Jess C. Scott

11. “It was frankly sort of confusing, the way everyone stared at our bodies exactly as they tried to erase the ideas of our bodies from our minds. We were supposed to get over ourselves but no one was supposed to get over us. The female body was our worst handicap and our best advantage -- the surest means to success, the surest course to failure. (p. 72)” - Hilary Thayer Hamann

12. “By the grace of the Lady, whose face mirrors my own, may I ever remember I am made in her image, blessed and beautiful.” - Dianne Sylvan

13. “It was your body....that danced at your first drum circle; it was your body that gave birth to your child; it was your body that got down and dirty in the back seat of your dad's station wagon; it was your body that shivered, sweated, clasped its hands, fell to its knees, wept, and laughed the first time you felt the presence of the goddess in your life.” - Dianne Sylvan

14. “Consider the holiness of your hands. They are how you do your work on this earth; they are a microcosm of the hands of the Goddess, and can change the world as easily as hers can.” - Dianne Sylvan

15. “...she is careful who she sleeps with, because only those willing totreat her witht he same reverence are worthy of her attention....you are the Goddess, and "all acts of love and pleasure" are your rituals” - Dianne Sylvan

16. “Beauty is the virtue of the body as virtue is the beauty of the soul” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

17. “The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body.” - George Sheehan

18. “And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes.” - Meg Rosoff

19. “My bottom is my deliquent daughter. I lavish praise upon her cheeks when she's well behaved and when she gets out of control, I pretend she isn't mine.” - Anna Johnson

20. “To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.” - Oscar Wilde

21. “She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.” - Milan Kundera

22. “My body is an ugly masterpiece that lives off the beauty of sound.” - Chad Sugg

23. “I am older than your age and younger than your body.” - Santosh Kalwar

24. “Consider the capacity of the human body for pleasure. Sometimes, it is pleasant to eat, to drink, to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, to make love. The mouth. The eyes. The fingertips, The nose. The ears. The genitals. Our voluptific faculties (if you will forgive me the coinage) are not exclusively concentrated here. The whole body is susceptible to pleasure, but in places there are wells from which it may be drawn up in greater quantity. But not inexhaustibly. How long is it possible to know pleasure? Rich Romans ate to satiety, and then purged their overburdened bellies and ate again. But they could not eat for ever. A rose is sweet, but the nose becomes habituated to its scent. And what of the most intense pleasures, the personality-annihilating ecstasies of sex? I am no longer a young man; even if I chose to discard my celibacy I would surely have lost my stamina, re-erecting in half-hours where once it was minutes. And yet if youth were restored to me fully, and I engaged again in what was once my greatest delight – to be fellated at stool by nymphet with mouth still blood-heavy from the necessary precautions – what then? What if my supply of anodontic premenstruals were never-ending, what then? Surely, in time, I should sicken of it.“Even if I were a woman, and could string orgasm on orgasm like beads on a necklace, in time I should sicken of it. Do you think Messalina, in that competition of hers with a courtesan, knew pleasure as much on the first occasion as the last? Impossible.“Yet consider.“Consider pain.“Give me a cubic centimeter of your flesh and I could give you pain that would swallow you as the ocean swallows a grain of salt. And you would always be ripe for it, from before the time of your birth to the moment of your death, we are always in season for the embrace of pain. To experience pain requires no intelligence, no maturity, no wisdom, no slow working of the hormones in the moist midnight of our innards. We are always ripe for it. All life is ripe for it. Always.” - Jesus Ignacio Aldapuerta

25. “Adrian had always found it amusing that a guy could be drilling Stacia up her ass while she considered herself to be a virgin. Her intent had been to present herself as such when she found "Mr. Right.” - Jess C. Scott

26. “Mental strength induces mind and body.” - Toba Beta

27. “I'm a fountain of blood. In the shape of a girl.” - Bjork

28. “People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. so they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.” - Kurt Vonnegut

29. “We must realize that we are all, like Dr. Faust, ready to accept the devil's inducements. The devil is in each one of us in the form of an ego that promises the fulfillment of desire on condition that we become subservient to its striving to dominate. The domination of the personality by the ego is a diabolical perversion of the nature of man. The ego was never intended to be the master of the body, but its loyal and obedient servant. The body, as opposed to the ego, desires pleasure, not power. Bodily pleasure is the source from which all our good feelings and good thinking stems. If the bodily pleasure of an individual is destroyed, he becomes an angry, frustrated, and hateful person. His thinking becomes distorted, and his creative potential is lost. He develops self-destructive attitudes.” - Alexander Lowen

30. “Last night I was seriously considering whether I was a bisexual or not but I don’t think so though I’m not sure if I’d like to be and argh I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, if you like a person, you like the person, not their genitals.” - Jess C. Scott

31. “I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do — to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited and harmful image of people. It thus impedes a broader social acceptance of what someone, or a group of people, might actually be like.” - Jess C. Scott

32. “The love of money is the root of all evil, therefore selfishness must be the seed.” - M.D. Birmingham

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

34. “Morse stared morosely at the blotting paper. "It's just not my sort of case, Lewis. I know it's not a very nice thing to say, but I just get on better when we've got a body - a body that died from unnatural causes. That's all I ask. And we haven't got a body.” - Colin Dexter

35. “They dream of men with gentle hands, eloquent with tenderness, fingers that brushed along a cheek, that outlined open lips in the lovers' braille. Hands that sculpted sweetness from sullen flesh, that traced breast and ignited hips, opening, kneading. Flesh becomes bread in the heat of those hands, braided and rising.” - Janet Fitch

36. “Using the combined, integrated force of the mind and body is more efficient than using one without the other. Since the body can only exist in the present, that’s where the mind should be too (unless we deliberately choose to contemplate the past or future). At the same time, the body needs to be healthy and in optimum operating condition so that it can respond effectively to the mind’s directives.” - H.E. Davey

37. “When a man touches a woman's body, he is not just touching her body. It goes MUCH DEEPER than that for a woman. He is touching parts of her soul-parts as diverse as how she feels about being a grandmother some day, to what is her favorite ice cream, to how much she loves her pet, and to her opinion of how the current President is governing. The man wants a sexual encounter and love is far from his mind; she desires permanence, commitment, safety, and security.” - Jim Anderson

38. “I usually like to interact with people who don't speak until it's necessary but I was intimidated by Carl's physique. I didn't feel inferior so much as incompatible. Carl existed on a plane where success was measured by physical feats. He had a brain because his body needed it, rather than the opposite. I didn't understand such people. I didn't know what they wanted, or might do.” - Max Barry

39. “Take a trip to the exotic landscape of your lover’s body.” - Alexandra Katehakis

40. “Which type of wedding gown best suits you?If you are lucky enough to be tall and slender, you can pretty much get away with any type or shape of gown. That is why models are tall and slender—anything looks good on them!” - Meg Cabot

41. “My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king.HAMLET The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing -GUILDENSTERN A thing my lord?HAMLET Of nothing. Bring me to him. Hide fox, and all after!” - William Shakespeare

42. “Just like your body and lifestyle can be healthy or unhealthy, the same is true with your beliefs. Your beliefs can be your medicine or your poison.” - Steve Maraboli

43. “Nakamura Tempu Sensei viewed the mind as a segment of the body that could not be seen and the body as the element of the mind that was observable. He also likened the mind and body to a stream, with the mind as the source flowing down to the body. Whatever we drop in the stream will be carried down by the current. In like manner, our thoughts will influence the body and our well being.” - H.E. Davey

44. “Body and soul can never be marriedI need to become who I already am and will bellow forever at this incongruity which has committed me to hell” - Sarah Kane

45. “In a swamp, as in meditation, you begin to glimpse how elusive, how inherently insubstantial, how fleeting our thoughts are, our identities. There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams, smears them into the upright world, rots the wood of treasure chests, welcomes the body home.” - Barbara Hurd

46. “What happened to you?" she asked."Ben was feeling artistic. Wanted to rearrange my face.” - Stacey Kade

47. “Do you have any idea who Erin was kissing?""Yeah, so we'll brush out teeth really, really thoroughly afterwards," I said, bumping her nose with mine gently. I wasn't going to let anyone spoil this moment.” - Stacey Kade

48. “Disbelief held me down inside my footsteps, making my body heavy but my heart wild.” - Markus Zusak

49. “The mind is satisfied with phrased, but not the body, the body is more fastidious, it wants muscles. A body always tells the truth, that's why it's usually depressing and disgusting to look at.” - Louis-Ferdinand Celine

50. “This is why we must transcend our physical bodies. Because a body is always going to piss you off” - Suzanne Morrison

51. “Let us at least say of religion that it means that every part of the body is infused with mind, not that the mind is overwhelmed and drowned in body. For the principal attribute of the Gods, without or within us, is mind.” - Thornton Wilder

52. “my problem is that my body acts before my brain thinks... it sometimes brings me huge trouble, or also huge success. recently, my body and brain got come to an agreement. it may be far better to live this gambling life than living in boring average ...they at least make my art more interesting” - Hiroko Sakai

53. “Although contemplating the nature of the body highlights its less attractive features, the purpose of the exercise is not to demonize the body. While it is certainly true that at times the discourses describe the human body in rather negative terms, some of these instances occur in a particular context in which the point being made is that the speakers in question have overcome all attachment to their body. In contrast, the Kāyagatāsati Sutta takes the physical bliss of absorption attainment as an object for body contemplation. This passage clearly demonstrates that contemplation of the body is not necessarily linked to repugnance and loathing.The purpose of contemplating the nature of the body is to bring its unattractive aspects to the forefront of one's attention, thereby placing the attractive aspects previously emphasized in a more balanced context. The aim is a balanced and detached attitude towards the body. With such a balanced attitude, one sees the body merely as a product of conditions, a product with which one need not identify.” - Anālayo

54. “Le jugement du corps vaut bien celui de l'esprit et le corps recule devant l'anéantissement. Nous prenons l'habitude de vivre avant d'acquérir celle de penser.” - Albert Camus

55. “Понякога се пробуждах посред нощ, с пресъхнала уста, и преди още да изплувам от съня, нещо ми пошушваше да заспя пак, да се гмурна обратно в топлината, в безсъзнателността като в единствено затишие. Но вече си казвах: „Просто съм жадна, достатъчно е да се изправя, да ида до умивалника, да пия вода и пак да заспя”. Ала щом станех, щом видех в огледалото собствения си образ, смътно осветен от уличната лампа, щом хладката вода започнеше да се стича в гърлото ми, тогава отчаянието ме завладяваше и с истинско усещане за физическа болка си лягах отново, зъзнейки. Просвах се по корем, обхванала глава в ръце, и притисках тяло о кревата, сякаш любовта ми към Люк бе горещо и смъртоносно животинче, което в бунта си бих могла да премажа между кожата си и чаршафите. И битката се разразяваше. Паметта, въображението се превръщаха в жестоки врагове. Лицето на Люк, Кан, какво е било и какво би могло да бъде. И неспир отпорът на тялото ми, което бе сънено, на разума ми, който бе отвратен. Вирвах глава, съставях уравнения:”Аз съм аз, Доминик. Обичам Люк, който не ме обича. Несподелена любов, задължителна мъка. Точка.” - Françoise Sagan

56. “Your body is the house you grew up in. How dare you try to burn it to the ground.” - Sierra DeMulder

57. “He’s like a hero come back from thewar, a poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams.Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door heenters the room is empty: whatever he puts in his mouth leaves abad taste. Everything is just the same as it was before; theelements are unchanged, the dream is no different than the reality.Only, between the time he went to sleep and the time he woke up,his body was stolen.” - Henry Miller

58. “Rien n'est plus beau qu'un corps nu. Le plus beau vêtement qui puisse habiller une femme ce sont les bras de l'homme qu'elle aime. Mais, pour celles qui n'ont pas eu la chance de trouver ce bonheur, je suis là.” - Yves Saint Laurent

59. “Bioenergetics is an adventure in self-discovery. It differs from similar explorations into the nature of the self by attempting to understand the human personality in terms of the human body. Most previous explorations focused their investigations on the mind.” - Alexander Lowen

60. “Once you can let go of illusion and draw upon a more universal source of motivation then you will re connect with your true purpose on Earth.” - Gary Markwick

61. “The real dance is a spontaneous body movement that in harmony with the beats of the music in your heart.” - Toba Beta

62. “Our shoes carry our body, so we polish them; our body carries our soul, so we clean the body, but, what about our soul”?” - Rahul Rampal

63. “Tada sam počeo postavljati pitanja o tome što je volja, gdje je duša, čime se hrani misao i je li i ona, misao, također imenica iz skupine mislenih imenica, mogu li glagoli napadati, a ako mogu, jesu li predmet njihova napada moje misli ili moji organi..., i na koncu, ako mogu zamisliti svoje unutarnje organe, jesu li tada po postanku organi ispred misli ili je misao ta koja proizvodi moje tijelo?” - Jasna Horvat

64. “People worry so much. Just enjoy your body. That you can love. And you're alive.” - Francesca Lia Block

65. “In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.” - Sei Shonagon

66. “You are a human being, not a human body.” - Kate Wicker

67. “You can tell a rider's fitness by the shape of his ass and the veins in his legs.” - Tyler Hamilton

68. “It was a bitch living with your old English teacher, especially when your old English teacher wasn’t old at all, and he had exactly the kind of body that most appealed to her, tall and lean, broad in the shoulder, narrow at the hip. Then there was his brain. It had taken her a lot of years to find that particular part of a man appealing, but she’d finally gotten in the habit, and she couldn’t seem to give it up.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

69. “Fie, fie upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out at every joint and motive of her body.” - William Shakespeare

70. “For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.” - Flannery O'Connor

71. “Our first experience of life is primarily felt in the *body.* ... We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us and gaze upon us. It's not heard or seen or thought it's felt. That's the original knowing.” - Richard Rohr

72. “His closeness makes my heart beat faster, my skin tingle, my body want things it doesn't even know.” - Teri Terry

73. “Cemeteries are full of unfulfilled dreams... countless echoes of 'could have' and 'should have'… countless books unwritten… countless songs unsung... I want to live my life in such a way that when my body is laid to rest, it will be a well needed rest from a life well lived, a song well sung, a book well written, opportunities well explored, and a love well expressed.” - Steve Maraboli

74. “Love yourself enough to take care of your health of mind, body, and soul as a top priority, then you'lll be fit to face anything.” - jay woodman

75. “The neural basis for the self, as I see it, resides with the continuous reactivation of at least two sets of representations. One set concerns representations of key events in an individual's autobiography, on the basis of which a notion of identity can be reconstructed repeatedly, by partial activation in topologically organized sensory maps. ... In brief, the endless reactivation of updated images about our identity (a combination of memories of the past and of the planned future) constitutes a sizable part of the state of self as I understand it.The second set of representations underlying the neural self consists of the primordial representations of an individual's body ... Of necessity, this encompasses background body states and emotional states. The collective representation of the body constitute the basis for a "concept" of self, much as a collection of representations of shape, size, color, texture, and taste can constitute the basis for the concept of orange.” - António R. Damásio

76. “Old age. All the facial detail is visible; all the traces life has left there are to be seen. The face is furrowed, wrinkled, sagging, ravaged by time. But the eyes are bright and, if not young, then somehow transcend the time that otherwise marks the face. It is as though someone else is looking at us, from somewhere inside the face, where everything is different. One can hardly be closer to another human soul.” - Karl Ove Knausgård

77. “What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?” - Ben Marcus

78. “but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

79. “The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice.But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.” - Milan Kundera

80. “There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'stBut in his motion like an angel sings,Still quiring [making music] to the young-eyed cherubins; Such harmony is in immortal souls,But whilst this muddy vesture of decayDoth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it.” - William Shakespeare

81. “The greatest crimes in the world are not committed against the body, but against the freedom of the consciousness.” - Bryant McGill