We Can Do Hard Things, & These Glennon Doyle Quotes Can Help

No one can deny the wisdom found in Glennon Doyle quotes. The author-turned-podcaster first gained notoriety with her blog, Momastery, in 2009. Now, she’s the best-selling author of three books, Untamed, Love Warrior, and Carry On Warrior, and recently launched her new podcast, We Can Do Hard Things, back in 2021. Not surprisingly, the latter has become an instant hit. What’s powerful about Doyle is her ability to tap into and articulate the human experience, how it’s often painful, vulnerable, and, yes, hard — especially in the sphere of motherhood. Doyle is beloved for her empowering advice and nuggets of inspiration that allow us all to feel seen, heard, and appreciated for who we are and all we’ve endured.

Above all, her writing is a love letter to women and all of our beautiful complexities. No wonder she’s been number one on the New York Times best sellers’ list — she’s profound with her wisdom and “untamed” when it comes to rallying our hearts. If you need some self-love and inspiration, read these quotes to keep pressing on and help you love yourself like it’s your number one job (because it is!).

Glennon Doyle Quotes to Empower and Inspire You

1. “This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they’ve never been.”
2. “Judgment is self-abandonment.”
3. “The only meaningful thing we can offer one another is love. Not advice, not questions about our choices, not suggestions for the future, just love.”
4. “The truest, most beautiful life never promises to be an easy one. We need to let go of the lie that it’s supposed to be.”
5. “No woman on earth doesn’t give a f*ck — no woman is that cool —she’s just hidden her fire. Likely, it’s burning her up.”
6. “Every beautiful thing in life comes out of the mess.”
7. “Life is a quest to find an unfindable thing. We are put here needing something that doesn’t exist here.”
8. “The only thing that was ever wrong with me was my belief that there was something wrong with me.”
9. “Trusting people is terrifying. Maybe if love is not a little scary and out of our control, then it is not love at all.”
10. “It turned out what I needed most was inside the one place I’d been running from my entire life: pain.”
11. “Stop making parenthood harder by pretending it’s not hard.”
12. “People who are hurting don’t need avoiders, protectors, or fixers. What we need are patient, loving witnesses. People to sit quietly and hold space for us. People to stand in helpful vigil to our pain.”
13. “I will not stay — not ever again — in a room or conversation or relationship or institution that requires me to abandon myself.”
14. “I’m trying to strip myself down to my barest essentials so I can figure out where I begin and where the woman the world told me to be begins. I’m going back to the starting line.”
15. “Be careful with the stories you tell about yourself.”
16. “People who need help sometimes look a lot like people who don’t need help.”
17. “What if pain — like love — is just a place brave people visit?”
18. “I did not know that I was supposed to feel everything. I thought I was supposed to feel happy.”
19. “I have met my self, and I am going to care for her fiercely.”
20. “It’s nearly impossible to blaze one’s own path while following in someone else’s footsteps.”
21. “I decided that if I kept doing the ‘right’ thing, I would spend my life following someone else’s directions instead of my own.”
22. “To me, intimacy is about communication. Through the written or spoken or physically expressed word, communicating is how we get into each other’s hearts and minds.”
23. “People will like me or not, but being liked is not my one thing; integrity is… I’m willing to lose anything that requires me to hide any part of myself.”
24. “What if in skipping the pain, I was missing my lessons?”
25. “We think our job as humans is to avoid pain, our job as parents is to protect our children from pain, and our job as friends is to fix each other’s pain. Maybe that’s why we all feel like failures so often — because we all have the wrong job description for love.”
26. “We are so afraid of dying. Also of living.”
27. “Blessed are those brave enough to make things awkward, for they wake us up and move us forward.”
28. “These things will be hard, but you can do hard things.”
29. “Recovery is unbecoming. My healing has been a peeling away of costume after costume until here I am, still and naked before God, stripped down to my real identity.”
30. “The most revolutionary thing a woman can do is not explain herself.”
31. “If there’s a silver lining to the emptiness, here it is: The unfillable is what brings people together. I’ve never made a friend by bragging about my strengths, but I’ve made countless by sharing my weakness and my emptiness.”
32. “We only control what we don’t trust.”
33. “Life is hard — not because we’re doing it wrong, just because it’s hard.”
34. “You can’t lose people who never even found you.”
35. “Grief shatters. If you let yourself shatter and then you put yourself back together, piece by piece, you wake up one day and realize that you have been completely reassembled.”
36. “It’s OK to feel too much and know too little.”
37. “Kind people are brave people. Brave is not something you should wait to feel. Brave is a decision. It is a decision that compassion is more important than fear, than fitting in, than following the crowd.”
38. “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
39. “So what is it in a human life that creates bravery, kindness, wisdom, and resilience? What if it’s pain? What if it’s the struggle?”
40. “Because love is not something for which to search or wait or hope or dream. It’s simply something to do.”
41. “Be messy and complicated and afraid, and show up anyway.”
42. “The journey is learning that pain, like love, is simply something to surrender to. It’s a holy space we can enter with people only if we promise not to tidy up.”
43. “Here’s my hunch: Nobody’s secure, and nobody feels like she completely belongs. Those insecurities are just job hazards of being human. But some people dance anyway, and those people have more fun.”
44. “Love casts out fear. A woman who has recovered her true identity as a Love Warrior is the most powerful force on earth. All the darkness and shame and pain in the world can’t defeat her.”
45. “The warrior knows that her heartbreak is her map.”
46. “A boundary is the edge of one of our root beliefs about ourselves and the world.”
47. “My courage will come from knowing I can handle whatever I encounter there — because I was designed by my creator to not only survive pain and love but also to become whole inside it. I was born to do this. I am a warrior.”
48. “Life is alchemy, and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold. I will continue to become only if I resist extinguishing myself a million times a day. If I can sit in the fire of my own feelings, I will keep becoming.”
49. “I think one of the keys to happiness is accepting that I am never going to be perfectly happy.”
50. “People aren’t changing, after all. It’s just that for the first time, there’s enough freedom for people to stop changing who they are.”
51. “We forget how to know when we learned how to please.”
52. “Every truth is a kindness, even if it makes others uncomfortable. Every untruth is an unkindness, even if it makes others comfortable.”
53. “Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else.”
54. “Healing is not the reward for those who lose the most or best.”
55. “We ask if our ideas make sense instead of assuming they do.”
56. “I think we are only bitter about other people’s joy in direct proportion to our commitment to keep joy from ourselves.”
57. “Perhaps imagination is not where we go to escape reality but where we go to remember it.”
58. “When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself.”
59. “The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely. Because a very effective way to control women is to convince women to control themselves.”
60. “When we free our wild, that frees other people to free themselves too.”
61. “A woman becomes a responsible parent when she stops being an obedient daughter.”
62. “I stopped being a quiet peacekeeper and started being a loud peacemaker. My anger was good.”
63. “You are not a mess. You are a feeling person in a messy world.”
64. “Don’t let yourself become so concerned with raising a good kid that you forget you already have one.”
65. “When her pain is fresh and new, let her have it. Don’t try to take it away. Forgive yourself for not having that power. Grief and pain are like joy and peace; they are not things we should try to snatch from each other. They’re sacred. They are part of each other person’s journey. All we can do is offer relief from this fear: I am all alone. That’s the one fear you can alleviate.”
66. “I still get very high and very low in life. Daily. But I’ve finally accepted the fact that sensitive is just how I was made, that I don’t have to hide it, and I don’t have to fix it. I’m not broken.”
67. “You do not have to agree with me to love me.”
68. “If you feel something calling you to dance or write or paint or sing, please refuse to worry about whether you’re good enough. Just do it. Be generous. Offer a gift to the world no one else can offer: yourself.”
69. “Grief is love’s souvenir. It’s our proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: ‘Look! Love was once mine. I love well. Here is my proof that I paid the price.'”
70. “That’s the thing about parenting: anxious if you do, anxious if you don’t.”
71. “You are not crazy. You are goddamn cheetah.”
72. “If grace isn’t shocking and countercultural and scandalous and a little ridiculous, then it’s not grace.”
73. “Our boys are born with great potential for nurturing, caring, loving, and serving. Let’s stop training it out of them.”
74. “I guess women have to almost die before we give ourselves permission to live how we want.”
75. “You have to turn your head to see peripheral miracles.”
76. "We know we must decide whether to stay small, quiet, and uncomplicated or allow ourselves to grow as big, loud, and complex as we were made to be."
77. "Despair says, 'The heartbreak is too overwhelming. I am too sad and too small, and the world is too big. I cannot do it all, so I will do nothing.'"
78. “The amazing thing about love and attention and encouragement and grace and success and joy is that these things are infinite. We get a new supply every single morning, and so we can give it away all day. We never, ever have to monitor the supply of others or grab or hoard.”
79. “I understand myself differently now. I was just a caged girl made for wide-open skies.”