Vulnerability Quotes

“When two people respect each other, the ability to be vulnerable and to reveal hurt feelings can create a powerful emotional connection that is the source of real intimacy and friendship.”
― David D. Burns

“Worrying about scarcity is our culture's version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we've been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability) we're angry and scared and at each other's throats.”
― Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

“We owe our children – the most vulnerable citizens in any society – a life free from violence and fear.”
― Nelson Mandela

“I hate feeling so weak and vulnerable.

I hate that I miss him.

I hate that I am alone, and I always was.

I hate that I made him into a superhero, he was not.

I hate that he doesn't want to kiss me.

I hate that every time I cry over one boy it's like crying over all of them again.”
― Bill Shapiro, Other People's Love Letters: 150 Letters You Were Never Meant to See

“Remember that every person who you come into contact to on any given day has a story that is probably far more amazing than you will imagine and no one is going to just offer up their entire life's worth of experiences to you because you want them to.

It takes time to draw someone's story out from within them. It takes trust. It takes sincerity and dedication.

Keep in mind that each and every interaction you have with all those people on a daily basis is a unique opportunity to develop any kind of relationship with that person that the two of you might want to be a part of.

It doesn't matter how you meet them or what it is that you do with them.

It can be as mundane as waving to them in the morning as they leave their driveway, or it can be as huge as saving someone's life in a moment of uncertainty and sacrifice.

Each person has the potential to become a friend or a lover or to simply teach you something important and then slip back into the endless rush of other bodies moving about the planet around us.

Don't pass these chances up too often, or you'll get lost in the tide yourself.”
― Ashly Lorenzana

“The intimacy that arises in listening and speaking truth is only possible if we can open to the vulnerability of our own hearts. Breathing in, contacting the life that is right here, is our first step. Once we have held ourselves with kindness, we can touch others in a vital and healing way.”
― Tara Brach, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart

“If we are going to find our way out of shame and back to each other, vulnerability is the path and courage is the light. To set down those lists of *what we're supposed to be* is brave. To love ourselves and support each other in the process of becoming real is perhaps the greatest single act of daring greatly.”
― Brené Brown

“Maybe I write because I’ve learned to show certain parts of my heart on the page that I still struggle to capture in speech.”
― common, One Day It'll All Make Sense

“I couldn't believe I let him see me like this, unable to fend for myself. I fumed in disgust at my vulnerability. I didn't want Evan to think I needed protecting. I pulled back my torment and let the numb blanket envelop me, pushing away the stirred memories, the noise of the crowd, and the trembling that still lay beneath the surface. I stared at the flames licking at the darkness and everything was lost as I sank deeper into nothingness.”
― Rebecca Donovan, Reason to Breathe

“...allowing yourself to be vulnerable makes you weak but also opens you to the nuances of beauty...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?”
― Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of Love

“Sometimes it's better to show our vulnerability / pain / regrets so others don't think us impervious / unapproachable - be real / open”
― Jay Woodman

“I just read this great quote by Junot Diaz, he was talking about true intimacy, and he was saying that it was the willingness to be vulnerable and to be found out. That’s what I felt that YA did. It wasn't pretentious, and it wasn’t hiding its heart. It wanted to be found out...

It felt like those moments when you go to a party and you're standing around for a long time, going, I don't fit in here, what am I going to talk to these people about? And everybody's getting drunk, and then you find this one person, and you end up sitting in some corner talking about all these arcane things.

And then before you know it you're having a conversation about the meaning of life and it's four o’clock in the morning. That kind of feeling, that kind of intimacy — I felt like that's what I got from YA.”
― Libba Bray

“Hatred makes you weak where else love makes you vulnerable. There's a difference.”
― Lisa Cander

“Courage is vulnerability. Vulnerability is courage. Like shadow and light, neither one can exist without the other.”
― Wai Lan Yuen

“In reality, Eduardo hoped the mask would make him appear vulnerable and self conscious, like a wounded animal these stupid women would fight each other over to mend.”
― Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

“It pained her that a few hundred words in an also-ran newspaper could get her kicked out. That damned article.
And Rook.
Her sharpest agony. She had invested in this guy. Waited for this guy. Felt something for this guy that went beyond the bedroom ... or wherever else they took each other. Nikki did not give herself easily to a man, and this betrayal by Rook was why. Heat reflected on her answer at the oral boards about her greatest flaw and admitted her reply was a mask. Yes, her identification with her job was total. But her greatest flaw wasn’t overinvestment in her career. It was her reticence to be vulnerable. Unarmed as she was-literally-she had been emotionally so with Rook.
That was the gut shot that had blown clean through her soul.”
― Richard Castle

“As is often the case when I travel, my vulnerability -- like not knowing what the hell I'm going to do upon arrival -- makes me more open to outside interactions than I might be when I'm at home and think I know best what needs to be done. On the road, serendipity is given space to enter my life.”
― Andrew McCarthy, The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down

“We are all vulnerable but do not fear this, just revel in the chance to experience that & know & grow beyond.”
― Jay Woodman

“Not only did the angry villagers hound their monsters to the edge of town, they reproached her for being vulnerable to the torches.”
― Susan Stryker

“you simply couldn't guard yourself against dreams. they attacked late at night when a person was at the most vulnerable.”
― Kate O'Riordan, The angel in the house

“His passion she had expected, even his expertise, for a man of his years would not have been without women. She had even, in the long days of yearning, suspected his tenderness, which led him now to kiss her temples and the inner crook of her elbow with the same attention he gave to her lips and breasts.
What she had not anticipated was that he would be vulnerable as well.”
― Ruth Wind, Light of Day

“It was the ultimate cautionary tale, the moral being Don't fall, as if they were made of glass. In a sense they were--their fragility was irrefutable, medically proven--and yet Emily detested the inevitable rundown of accidents and tragedies, the more fortunate clucking their tongues and counting their blessings, all the while knowing it was just a matter of time. She didn't need to be reminded that she was a single misstep from disaster, especially here, without Henry, surrounded by the survivors of an earlier life.”
― Stewart O'Nan, Emily, Alone

“Meredith,' interposed Celia, 'makes one of his women, Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again.”
― Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware: Or Illumination

“We couldn’t change anything, and in times of war, people become helpless and vulnerable.”
― Shannon A. Thompson, November Snow

“…Carlotta hovered over us as we devoured her meatballs, running her floury fingers over the backs of our chairs, then gently touching our heads, the napes of our necks. We pretended not to notice, ashamed in front of one another and ourselves to show that we drank in her nurturance as eagerly as her meat sauce.”
― Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn