A Literary Prescription for

Self-Love

For learning to be on your own side — not as narcissism, but as the quiet, necessary act of treating yourself as someone worth caring for.

Self-love gets a bad reputation because it is often confused with selfishness or self-absorption, neither of which it resembles. Real self-love is closer to the attitude you would have toward a dear friend — warm, honest, forgiving of failures, genuinely interested in their flourishing. The books, poems, and words gathered here are about building that relationship with yourself, from wherever you are currently starting.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Books that make the case for self-love as foundation, not indulgence.

You Can Heal Your Life

Louise Hay · 1984

Hay’s landmark book, which has sold over fifty million copies, builds its entire framework on a single premise: that loving yourself is the answer. Whatever your view of her affirmation-based approach, her central insight — that most self-sabotage is rooted in the belief that you are not worthy of good things — is borne out by decades of subsequent research. For readers at the beginning of a self-love practice, Hay is the place to start.

The Mastery of Love

Don Miguel Ruiz · 1999

Ruiz draws on Toltec wisdom to argue that the relationship you have with yourself is the template for every relationship you will ever have. For readers whose self-love is undermined by how they were loved as children, Ruiz offers both explanation and a practical way to start rewriting the template, rather than simply enduring it.

Radical Self-Love

Gala Darling · 2016

Darling’s approach to self-love is deliberately joyful and irreverent — rooted in the idea that loving yourself should feel like fun rather than homework. For readers who find the softer, more therapeutic approaches to self-love too earnest, Darling offers the same wisdom with more glitter and considerably more laughter.

All About Love

bell hooks · 2000

Hooks’s examination of what love actually is — as opposed to what we were taught it was — includes one of the most important chapters on self-love ever written. She argues that loving yourself is not a starting point you can skip; it is the ground everything else grows from. Her definition of love as “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” remains one of the clearest ever articulated.

The Synergy Game

Georgia Clare · 2024

Part memoir, part practical guide, Georgia’s own book traces the slow, often unglamorous work of learning to love herself after her 34-year marriage ended in betrayal, left her at midlife with no map and no clear sense of who she was. Through writing, yoga, meditation, and gratitude, chapter by chapter, she shares the small, repeated choices that rebuilt her self-love, not as a single realisation but as hundreds of them.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Gail Honeyman · 2017

Eleanor has survived a great deal by deciding she does not need anyone, including, on some level, herself — and the novel is about what happens when that armour finally, carefully, comes off. It is funny and devastating in roughly equal measure, and it lands on something true about self-love: it is often less dramatic and more patient than people expect.

Poems about self-love

For when prose is not enough

Poems that model the quality of attention self-love requires.

“the hurt”

Nayyirah Waheed, salt., 2013

you.
not wanting me.
was the beginning
of me wanting myself.
thank you.

Waheed’s spare, contemporary style does in five lines what whole books on self-love sometimes take chapters to say: that someone else’s absence can be the exact thing that turns your attention back to yourself. It is a small, sharp poem, and it tends to stay with people.

Shop Nayyirah Waheed prints →

“Wild Geese”

Mary Oliver, 1986

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

The poem moves from an act of release — setting down an old, exhausting requirement to earn approval through suffering — into an invitation to simply trust your own instincts and appetites, however ordinary or undignified they might seem. By the final stanza, Oliver has widened the frame from one anxious person to the whole turning world, geese included, all of it announcing its own belonging without asking permission first. For readers whose self-love is blocked by a perfectionism that insists they become someone else before they qualify for care, the poem’s argument is that belonging was never conditional to begin with. Find it in Dream Work.

“Desiderata” (extract)

Max Ehrmann, 1927

You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.

Ehrmann’s prose poem, written almost a century ago and still quoted everywhere, distils self-love to its most fundamental claim: you have a right to be here. For anyone whose inner critic disputes that claim daily, Ehrmann states it quietly and absolutely.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about self-love to keep

Lines for the practice of being on your own side.

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

Buddha

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Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we’ll ever do.

Brené Brown

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Document the moments you feel most in love with yourself — what you’re wearing, who you’re around, what you’re doing. Recreate and repeat.

Warsan Shire

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You have been criticising yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.

Louise Hay

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I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

Madonna

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From Georgia

Pause here, if you need to

A short practice for sitting with self-love, whenever you need somewhere to land.

Healing Self-Talk: Self-Love Meditation

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A compassionate meditation for softening the inner critic and replacing harsh self-talk with warmth, acceptance, and self-love.

Listen Now For Free

I Am Enough: A Return to Yourself

Premium meditation · Georgia Clare

A meditation for the belief underneath most of the others, that you were enough before you achieved anything at all.

Listen to the preview →

The Inner Peace Toolkit

Digital Self-Care Toolkit · Georgia Clare

2 guided meditations, an Inner Peace Journal, an affirmations eBook, 10 printable affirmation prints and 10 calming phone wallpapers — small daily practices to come back to whenever you need to slow down and reconnect with yourself.

Explore the Toolkit →

Questions people ask

Reading for Self-Love

Where should I start?

If you only read one thing, begin with You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay. Hay’s landmark book, which has sold over fifty million copies, builds its entire framework on a single premise: that loving yourself is the answer. And if a whole book feels like too much today, scroll to the poems below — “the hurt” by Nayyirah Waheed can be read in a minute and asks nothing of you.

What’s the shortest thing to read here?

Start with the short forms on this page — the poems and the lines to keep — rather than a whole book. A poem or a single quote asks very little of you, and you don’t have to read in order, or finish anything.

What are the best quotes about self-love?

Quotes about self-love worth keeping include “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” (Buddha), “Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we’ll…” (Brené Brown) and “Document the moments you feel most in love with yourself — what you’re wearing, who you’re…” (Warsan Shire). You’ll find these and more in the quotes section above.

How should I read these — all at once, or slowly?

Slowly. This isn’t a reading list to finish; it’s a small shelf to return to. Keep one quote where you’ll see it, let a poem sit with you for a day, and pick up a book when it calls. Self-Love isn’t somewhere you arrive at by reading faster.

Self-Love

Prescribed reading

For when prose is not enough

Quotes about self-love to keep

Pause here, if you need to

Reading for Self-Love

Where should I start?

What’s the shortest thing to read here?

What are the best quotes about self-love?

How should I read these — all at once, or slowly?

More prescriptions await.