We can’t truly love others without loving ourselves

• You can’t love other people until you love yourself. Demi Lovato
• Loving others is easy when you love and accept yourself. Louise Hay
• Be loving towards yourself, then you will be able to love others too. Rajneesh
• Loving other people starts with loving ourselves and accepting ourselves. Ellen Page
• Love for yourself is the key to loving other. Love begins with you. Miguel Angel Ruiz
• Feeling good about ourselves is essential in our being able to love others. Fred Rogers
• Giving love to others is directly related to how much love you have for yourself! Wayne Dyer
• By doing the work to love ourselves more, I believe we will love each other better. Laverne Cox
• There’s something so magnificent about you. And as you love yourself, you’ll love others. Bob Proctor
• To love others you must love yourself…You can only give to others what you have yourself. Leo Buscaglia
• As you love yourself, so shall you love others. Strange but true, with no exceptions. Harry Stack Sullivan
• If you don’t love yourself, it’s impossible for you to love others. You can’t give away what you don’t have. Joyce Meyer
• Love brings you face to face with your self. It’s impossible to love another if you cannot love yourself. John Pierrakos
• How we love others is affected by how we love ourselves, and for the first time in a long time, I was whole. Richelle Mead
• To love oneself is to love life. It is essential to understand that we make ourselves happy in making others happy. Matthieu Ricard
• You’ve got to love yourself enough, not only so that others will be able to love you, but that you’ll be able to love others. Cornel West
• If you can learn to love yourself and all the flaws, you can love other people so much better. And that makes you so happy. Kristin Chenoweth
• A lot of people say if you can’t love yourself, then you can’t love others. It’s always different, but I definitely have loved a lot in my life. Melanie Martinez
• I learned that accepting others and accepting myself are two sides of the same coin; you can’t love and accept yourself without doing the same for others. Steve Pavlina
• Love is a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves. Brené Brown
• We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others. Thomas Merton
• Love of others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude of love towards themselves will be found in all those who are capable of loving others. Erich Fromm
• If you don’t love yourself, you cannot love others. You will not be able to love others. If you have no compassion for yourself then you are not able of developing compassion for others. Dalai Lama
• We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. John Lennon
• But to be able to kiss someone you love when you’re fully and completely in control of yourself and know who you are…it’s exquisite. How we love others is affected by how we love ourselves. Richelle Mead
• If you aren’t good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you’ll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren’t even giving to yourself. Barbara De Angelis
• The prerequisite to loving others is to love yourself. If you don’t have a healthy respect for who you are, and if you don’t learn to accept yourself faults and all, you will never be able to properly love other people. Joel Osteen
• You must love yourself before you love another. By accepting yourself and fully being what you are, your simple presence can make others happy You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection. Gautama Buddha
• Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else. Bell Hooks
• We cannot give what we do not have: We cannot bring peace to the world if we ourselves are not peaceful. We cannot bring love to the world if we ourselves are not loving. Our true gift to ourselves and others lies not in what we have but in who we are. Marianne Williamson
• It is only when you have mastered the art of loving yourself that you can truly love others. it’s only when you have opened your own heart that you can touch the hearts of others. when you feel centered and alive, you are in much better position to be a better person. Robin Sharma
• To the extent to which you know yourself, and we are all more alike than different, you can know others. When you love yourself, you will love others. And to the depth and extent to which you can love yourself, only to that depth and extent will you be able to love others. Leo Buscaglia
• It seems that for some people the idea of compassion entails a complete disregard for or even a sacrifice of their own interests. This is not the case. In fact, you first of all have to have a wish to be happy yourself – if you don’t love yourself like that, how can you love others? Dalai Lama
• The second commandment that Jesus referred to was not to love others instead of ourselves, but to love them as ourselves. Before we can love and serve others, we must love ourselves, even in our imperfection. If we don’t embrace our own defects, we can’t love others with their shortcomings. Jim Warner
• If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you will not really succeed in loving yourself but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person and that person is both God and man. Meister Eckhart
• The amount of love, kindness, patience I have for others is is directly proportional to how much love I have for myself, because we cannot give others what we ourselves do not have. And, unsurprisingly, the amount of love, respect, support, and compassion I receive from others is also in direct proportion to how much I love myself. Anita Moorjani
• Those who love others grandly are those who love themselves grandly. Those who have a high toleration and acceptance of others are those who have a high toleration and acceptance of themselves. You cannot show another a part of you that you cannot show yourself. Therefore, begin where all growth, where all evolution, where all love must begin; with the person in the mirror. Neale Donald Walsch
• Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them- we can only love others as much as we love ourselves. Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed, and rare. Brené Brown
• If we don’t love ourselves, we would not love others. When someone tell you to love others first, and to love others more than ourselves; it is impossible. If you can’t love yourselves, you can’t love anybody else. Therefore we must gather up our great power so that we know in what ways we are good, what special abilities we have, what wisdom, what kind of talent we have, and how big our love is. When we can recognize our virtues, we can learn how to love others. Ching Hai
• If we took just 5 minutes to recognize each other’s beauty, instead of attacking each other for our differences. That’s not hard. It’s really an easier and better way to live. And ultimately, it saves lives. Then again, it’s not easy at all. It can be the hardest thing, because loving other people starts with loving ourselves and accepting ourselves. I know many of you have struggled with this. I draw upon your strength and your support, and have, in ways you will never know. Ellen Page
• There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life. John Lennon

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Our relationship with ourselves sets the tone for all our relationships

• You can’t hate/love others without loving/hating yourself first. Tyga
• If you love yourself, you love others. If you hate yourself, you hate others. Rajneesh
• Genuine relationships depend first on a healthy relationship with ourselves. Sonia Choquette
• You can’t have relationships with other people until you give birth to yourself. Sonia Sanchez
• Your relationship with yourself sets the tone for every other relationship you have. Robert Holden
• Your private relationship with yourself is a spring that will feed every other factor. Ashley Judd
• I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too. Georg C. Lichtenberg
• People who love themselves, don’t hurt other people. The more we hate ourselves, the more we want others to suffer. Daniel Pearce
• We only hurt others because we don’t love ourselves. Learning to truly love yourself changes your relationship with everyone. Bryant H. McGill
• So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself. Alan Watts
• The most important relationship in your life is the relationship you have with yourself. Because no matter what happens, you will always be with yourself. Diane von Furstenberg
• Be gentle with yourself, learn to love yourself, to forgive yourself, for only as we have the right attitude toward ourselves can we have the right attitude toward others. Wilferd Peterson
• It is lack of love for ourselves that inhibits our compassion toward others. If we make friends with ourselves, then there is no obstacle to opening our hearts and minds to others. Dalai Lama
• Be committed to the relationship you have with yourself. We get so committed to other relationships, but often sort of toss ourselves away. We get around to ourselves only now and then. So, really care for who you are. Be committed to loving yourself. Take care of your heart and soul. Louise Hay
• The most important relationship we can all have is the one you have with yourself, the most important journey you can take is one of self-discovery. To know yourself, you must spend time with yourself, you must not be afraid to be alone. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Aristotle
• The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves. Eric Hoffer
• My primary relationship is with myself- all others are mirrors of it. As I learn to love myself, I automatically receive the love and appreciation that I desire from others. If I am commited to myself and to living my truth, I will attract others with equal commitment. My willingness to be intimate with my own deep feelings creates the space for intimacy with another. Shakti Gawain

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If we accept ourselves, it’s easier to accept others

• We have the need to be accepted and to be loved by others, but we cannot accept and love ourselves. The more self-love we have, the less we will experience self-abuse. Self-abuse comes from self-rejection, and self-rejection comes from having an image of what it means to be perfect and never measuring up to that ideal. Our image of perfection is the reason we reject ourselves the way we are, and why we don’t accept others the way they are. Miguel Angel Ruiz

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Loving yourself and others is a self-fulfilling cycle

• Self love is not opposed to the love of other people. You cannot really love yourself and do yourself a favor without doing other people a favor, and vice versa. Karl A. Menninger
• Loving and energizing others is the best possible thing we can do for ourselves. James Redfield
• Withholding love is a form of self-sabotage, as what we withhold from others we are withholding from ourselves. Marianne Williamson
• The more we grow in love and virtue and holiness, the more we see love and virtue and holiness outside. All condemnation of others really condemns ourselves. Adjust the microcosm (which is in your power to do) and the macrocosm will adjust itself for you. It is like the hydrostatic paradox, one drop of water can balance the universe. Swami Vivekananda
• Allow your love to nourish yourself as well as others. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
• Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life. Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us. Marianne Williamson
• When we fulfill our function, which is to truly love ourselves and share love with others, then true happiness sets in. Gabrielle Bernstein
• Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment. Self-love cannot flourish in isolation. Bell Hooks
• Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else. Bell Hooks
• What you admire in others will develop in yourself. Therefore, to love the ordinary in any one is to become ordinary, while to love the noble and the lofty in all minds is to grow into the likeness of that which is noble and lofty. Christian D. Larson
• Love other human beings as you would love yourself. Ho Chi Minh

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If we love ourselves, it’s easier for others to love us too

• If you love yourself, you will be surprised: others will love you. Nobody loves a person who does not love himself. Rajneesh
• Be loving to yourself and others will see that love reciprocated. This rule works every time. Oprah Winfrey
• First, you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too… Chuck Klosterman
• When you feel good about yourself, others will feel good about you, too. Jake Steinfeld
• If you want to change the way others treat you, you should first change the way you treat yourself. Unless you learn to love yourself, fully and sincerely, there is no way you can be loved. Once you achieve that stage, however, be thankful for every thorn that others might throw at you. It is a sign that you will soon be showered in roses. Shams Tabrizi
• Treat yourself the way you want to be treated by others… love yourself and you will be loved. Rhonda Byrne
• The secret of attraction is to love yourself. Attractive people judge neither themselves nor others. They are open to gestures of love. They think about love, and express their love in every action. They know that love is not a mere sentiment, but the ultimate truth at the heart of the universe. Deepak Chopra

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Love others and it’s easier to love yourself

• So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself. Alan Watts
• To bring yourself love and happiness, do what you can to bring them to others. Deepak Chopra
• Have only love in your heart for others. The more you see the good in them, the more you will establish good in yourself. Paramahansa Yogananda

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Love yourself and others will be inspired to love themselves too

• Accept yourself. Love yourself just as you are. Your finest work, your best moments, your joy, peace, and healing come when you love yourself. You give a great gift to the world when you do that. You give others permission to do the same: to love themselves. Revel in self love. Roll in it. Bask in it, as you would the sunshine. Melody Beattie

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Therefore, love yourself and then extend that love outwards

• Your life is a journey of learning to love yourself first and then extending that love to others in every encounter. Oprah Winfrey
• Love and compassion benefit both ourselves and others. Through kindness to others, your heart and mind will be peaceful and open. Dalai Lama
• We receive mixed messages about taking good care of ourselves. Love thy neighbor as thyself means to love thyself and thy neighbor. Yet, self-love often is confused with selfishness and conceit. We are selfish when we do not love and accept ourselves, and attempt to take from others to fill the emptiness. Conceit indicates low self-worth and an attempt to conceal it. It is difficult to extend to others what you have not been able to give yourself. Take good care of yourself so you can care about the rest of us. Jennifer James
• I believe that love is the choice we make to raise ourselves and others to the highest planes of existence. Richard Paul Evans
• Humans punish themselves endlessly for not being what they believe they should be. We have the need to be accepted and to be loved by others, but we cannot accept and love ourselves. Miguel Angel Ruiz
• Loving yourself…does not mean being self-absorbed or narcissistic, or disregarding others. Rather it means welcoming yourself as the most honored guest in your own heart, a guest worthy of respect, a lovable companion. Margot Anand
• All the other stuff without love? Not worth a whole lot. Love starts with ourselves and needs to be approached like anything else we want to master-with a lot of diligent studying and practicing! Brian Johnson
• The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that’s the chief thing, and that’s everything; nothing else is wanted – you will find out at once how to arrange it all. Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Love yourself and then see yourself in others

• Self-realization is the ability to see ourselves in all beings. This is the third eye through which you see, even while your two eyes are open. We should be able to love and serve others, seeing ourselves in them. This is the fulfillment of spiritual practice. Mata Amritanandamayi
• Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition. Alexander Smith
• To love is to recognize yourself in another. The others “otherness” then stands revealed as an illusion pertaining to the purely human realm, the realm of form. Eckhart Tolle
• Look upon others as being part of yourself. Mata Amritanandamayi
• Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition. Alexander Smith

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Self-love requires self-forgiveness

• When we harbor negative emotions toward others or toward ourselves, or when we intentionally create pain for others, we poison our own physical and spiritual systems. By far the strongest poison to the human spirit is the inability to forgive oneself or another person. It disables a person’s emotional resources. The challenge…is to refine our capacity to love others as well as ourselves and to develop the power of forgiveness. Caroline Myss

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Harness meditation to help love yourself

• With the practice of meditation we can develop this ability to more fully love ourselves and to more consistently love others. Sharon Salzberg
• Love means the art of being with others. Meditation means the art of being with yourself. Both are two aspects of the same coin. Rajneesh