Life & Wisdom Quote by Anthony J. D'Angelo

Self-help often gets caricatured as scented-candle wisdom, but D'Angelo’s line has a sharper edge: it treats inner life not as private mood management but as social infrastructure. “Get along with yourself” isn’t just self-esteem; it’s the daily skill of negotiating your own contradictions without outsourcing the conflict to everyone around you.

The intent is quietly corrective. It pushes back on a common fantasy that friction with others is mostly about other people being difficult. D'Angelo smuggles in a harder diagnosis: a lot of “bad chemistry” is displaced self-disagreement. If you’re at war with your choices, ashamed of your needs, or constantly performing a version of yourself you don’t even like, relationships become a stage for reenacting that unrest. The phrase “must first” makes it sequential, almost clinical: interpersonal harmony is downstream of intrapersonal truce.

The subtext is accountability without moralizing. It doesn’t tell you to “love yourself” in the Instagram sense; it tells you to tolerate yourself enough to be honest. That honesty is what stops passive aggression, people-pleasing, and the brittle defensiveness that turns every conversation into a referendum on your worth.

Context matters: D’Angelo writes from the late-20th-century American self-improvement tradition, where therapy language and workplace culture started blending. The quote fits that era’s faith in personal responsibility, but it also anticipates a modern truth: the self is already a crowded room (anxious brain, curated persona, real desire), and if you can’t broker peace there, you’ll try to draft others into doing it for you.