Vulnerability Quotes

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 integration of information and vulnerabilities move together.

R.A.Delmonico

It doesn't matter if you come from money or you are poor: If your family has already made you feel that you are not worthy, you begin to believe it, and when someone comes along and tells you that you are beautiful/special/wonderful and showers you with attention and gifts, or offers you money when you desperately need it, you are vulnerable and ready to trust

Patti Feuereisen

Underlying all these breaches is a single systemic security flaw, exactly 3.375 inches long. Credit card magstripes are a technological anachronism, a throwback to the age of the eight-track tape, and today the United States is virtually alone in nurturing this security hole.

Keith Poulsen

'And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants to be.'

Max Barry

If you want the naked beauty of my vulnerability, you have to have the strength to share the burden of, the private pain, that makes me feel so tender and fragile. For i am as strong, as i am, weak. If you want me to come home to you, be the safe harbor, in which, i can seek refuge.

Jaeda DeWalt

Sometimes living with memory, with the thought of what friends, those who shared your soul and dreams, will do to you is worse than taking a bullet or having someone stab your flesh. There is a way of bleeding from one's soul.

Megan McKenna

You know what’s so funny and sad about us human beings? . . . We are constantly torn between the all-consuming desire to be loved and the terrifying fear of being known. Deep inside we don’t believe the two things can exist together, that if anyone really knew us, they would surely never love us, so we spend our whole lives concocting this wonderful, plastic shell that we fight like madmen to keep pristine. But eventually the plastic cracks and what is inside is a raw, quivering mass of imperfect humanity that has always been lovely and precious enough for God Himself to love.

Earlene Fowler

If a brokenhearted mother could sing, I could not remain silent.

Beth Moore

He holds his hand out for me to see it like he’s cradling something delicate or breakable, an egg or like, his heart.

Eda J. Vor

It is almost as if we are all playing a big game of hide-and-go-seek. We all hide expecting to be found, but no one has been labelled the seeker. We stand behind the wall, at first excited, then worried, then bored, then anxious, then angry. We hide and hide. After a while, the game is not fun anymore. Where is my seeker? Where is the person who is supposed to come find me here in my protected shell and cut me open? Where is that one who will make me trust him, make me comfortable, make me feel whole? Some people rot on the spot, waiting for the seeker that never comes. The most important truth that I can relate to you, if you are hiding and waiting, is that the seeker is you and the world, behind so many walls, awaits.

Vironika Tugaleva

I often think that the effort we put into trying to pretend something about us is true — that we are less than we are or more than we are or that one aspect of ourselves is the whole story — is based in a fear of being really known, of being truly seen, as we actually are. Perhaps we each have a wound, a vulnerable place that we have to protect in order to survive. And yet sometimes we overcompensate so much for the things we are trying to hide that no one ever suspects the truth…and then we are left in the true aloneness of never really being known.

Nadia Bolz-Weber

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

Jay Woodman

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

The journey of reinvention is one of raw emotionsEmerging from dormancySurprising as a paper cutOverwhelming as a hailstormOne part vulnerabilityOne part rageOne part surrenderUncomfortableUnfamiliarUnsureFearfulAloneDamagedBrokenAnd finding a new SelfSlowlyDifferentHealingHumblePresentOpenLongingFree

Dave Rudbarg

It comes down to this: If you want to be seen, heard and understood in the most genuine way possible, be open to the possiblity of vulnerability. Allow yourself to be open. I know it’s a scary place, a place very few people dare to venture, but just try it. Try moving the masks away and really looking at a person the next time they engaged in conversation with you.

Leigh Hershkovich

I found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Jesus beckons me to follow him to that place of weakness where I risk the vulnerability of a child so that I might know how strong my Father is and how much he loves me. But truth be told, I would rather be an adult. I'd rather be in a place where I can still pull things together if God doesn't show up, where I risk no ultimate humiliation, where I don't have to take the shallow breaths of desperation. And as a result, my experience of my heavenly Father is simply impoverished.

Gary Haugen

That's the thing about being a victim; you start to think it'll happen to you on a regular basis. It's living with the reality of your own vulnerability, and it sucks.

Dennis Lehane

Those who were molested or beaten as children or teenagers might later be vulnerable to sexual abuse or violence, because their natural impulses to protect themselves and protest (physical and verbal) were extinguished. Expectation of hurtful treatment by others or one's own failed capabilities can stubbornly persist despite overwhelming evidence that such is no longer the case.

Babette Rothschild

A heart that can break is better than no heart at all.

Marty Rubin

A poet is someone who never forgets they were born naked.

Marty Rubin

Jim turned his head slowly to look into my eyes and shuddered. “It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to dying.

Susan Oakey-Baker

People can be at their most vulnerable, but still tenacious at the same time.

Toni Bernhard

Heroes are higher than their vulnerability that is why they are heroes.

Amit Kalantri

I learned something important that night. You shouldn’t try to stop everything from happening. Sometimes you’re supposed to feel awkward. Sometimes you’re supposed to be vulnerable in front of people. Sometimes it’s necessary because it’s all part of you getting to the next part of yourself, the next day.

Cecelia Ahern

There is a quiet transformation happening that is moving us from 'turning on each other' to 'turning toward each other.' Without question, that transformation will require shame resilience. If we're willing to dare greatly and risk vulnerability with each other, worthiness has the power to set us free.

Brené Brown

[W]e all care deeply about things that seem totally inconsequential to other people. We all carry around with us the flotsam and jetsam of perceived humiliations that actually mean nothing. We are a mass of vulnerabilities, and who knows what will trigger them?

Jon Ronson

As children, a great number of us were taught by our parents, carers, extended family members, and teachers, that showing any form of emotional vulnerability was “not OK.” We were conditioned to believe that in order to be acceptable as human beings, we had to be like the other children. We were taught to “suck it up,” “stop being cry babies,” “get thicker skin,” “stop being so sensitive” and go participate with the other kids, even if they overwhelmed us with their energy.

Mateo Sol

you simply couldn't guard yourself against dreams. they attacked late at night when a person was at the most vulnerable.

Kate O'Riordan

When you love someone, truly love them, you lay your heart open to them. You give them a part of yourself that you give to no one else, and you let them inside a part of you that only they can hurt-you literally hand them the razor with a map of where to cut deepest and most painfully on your heart and soul. And when they do strike, it’s crippling-like having your heart carved out.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

He had found that jealousy – or perhaps the fear of betrayal – was no respecter of age. Indeed, if anything, he thought getting older simply made it worse; he felt more vulnerable now.

Kathy Shuker

Papilio stomachus: fragile creatures, vulnerable to forst and betrayal.

Laini Taylor

The horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

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

Hatred makes you weak where else love makes you vulnerable. There's a difference.

Girl234

Sticks and stones may break your bones, and words – can cut your insides.

Jen Pollock Michel

Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability - a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one's own best self and one's own best words and questions.

Krista Tippett

Nita: I think I overdid the vulnerability stuff in this last letter. and that’s why I’m having an anxiety attack.Howard: With the vulnerability comes the possibility that you’ll be betrayed. Now that you’ve laid yourself wide open, I am the agent of this betrayal? It’s not my style.Nita: I’ve thought it wasn't other people’s style, too.

Sarah E. Olson

Let me lay bare my soulto show you’re not alonein this naked rawness- Vulnerable

Abby Rosmarin

Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.

William Gibson

Few of us enter romantic relationships able to receive love. We fall into romantic attachments doomed to replay familiar family dramas. Usually we do not know this will happen precisely because we have grown up in a culture that has told us that no matter what we experience in our childhoods, no matter the pain, sorrow, alienation, emptiness, no matter the extent of our dehumanization, romantic love will be ours. We believe we will meet the girl of our dreams. We believe 'someday our prince will come.' They show up just as we imagined they would. We wanted the lover to appear but most of us were not clear about what we wanted to do with them-what the love was that we wanted to make and how we would make it. We were not ready to open our hearts fully.

Bell Hooks

Sex is a metaphor for everything else and everything is a metaphor for sex as well. Because sex is a coming together of two weather patterns, two separate countries, two entities in a conscious state of potentially blissful crisis. Or chaos, or harmony. You’re not quite sure what’s going to happen, but it is the most catastrophic, exciting, and weakening thing that can happen to us. If we are personally involved in it, every fiber of our being is made self-conscious, or is encourages to unify on some level with others. We are delicate. We bring our damage to sexuality, we bring our hopes, we bring our self-image, we bring our world-image, we bring what we believe we are/what we believe we aren’t, our blind spots, our prejudices, our sadness. Everything comes out. A lot of people are left wanting, and confusing, and having the idea that their body is like an unloved apartment building; it’s up for grabs and it’s of absolutely no worth. If we feel that way about ourselves and if we feel that way about others, then of course, sex is nothing more than a lot of rubbing and some kind of release. But the more we are, the more we can feel, the more we can empathize, the more human we are.

Melinda Gebbie

Control is an illusion—a fact you will learn very fast if you become ill, or have things fall apart in some other way. When we understand vulnerability and suffering as an essential part of being human, our individual fate can be easier to manage.

Harriet Lerner

I'm perfectly willing to be perfectly human.

Donald Miller

It doesn't get any easier. You have to stay close to the people you trust so they can put you back together again.

Girl Meets World

We do not become less needy, less dependent when we pray; we become more needy, more dependent, which is to say, more human.

Eugene H. Peterson

The author says crises tend to reveal the connectivity of systems that had previously been study only in isolation.

Andrew Zolli

She had responded to the loss of her husband, to poverty, to disease, and to family cruelty with boldness and ingenuity, by opening herself to others, especially to her children and her Church, pouring into these precious vessels her knowledge, hope, and devotion.

Philip Zaleski

These secrets are not secrets per se but are truths hidden from public view. I had to write this book. There had to be a reason I survived to tell this story.

Rebecca Allard

I have so much respect for the emotionally brave. The ones who put in the emotional work and take the real risks of being vulnerable and removing masks. It's easy to make chitchat, but it's hard to speak about what's really under the surface. It's easy to joke, but difficult to cry. It's easy to numb, but hard to feel.Ironically the real victims of emotional laziness are the people themselves. They end up choosing their emotional comfort zones over happiness. So in the end, they may not be 'uncomfortable' anymore; but they are also miserable.

Yasmin Mogahed

When you see through a defense mechanism, you don’t stop at the intimidating behavior but go right on into the underlying misperception about life and through that to the path back to harmony. When you see through people’s fear-based actions, motives, and secrets, you’re really aiming for their sweet vulnerability, inner beauty, and magnificence—and you find their soul.

Penney Peirce

His one essay in love had exhausted his powers in that direction.

Barbara W. Tuchman

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

Nelson Mandela

Augustine in City of God pictures a resurrection in which the bodily systems we no longer need to protect ourselves can use energy to praise God.

Matt Chandler

The Chinese ideograph for forbearance is a heart with a sword dangling over it, another instance of language's brilliant way of showing us something surprising and important fossilized inside the meaning of a word. Vulnerability is built into our hearts, which can be sliced open at any moment by some sudden shift in the arrangements, some pain, some horror, some hurt. We all know and instinctively fear this, so we protect our hearts by covering them against exposure. But this doesn't work. Covering the heart binds and suffocates it until, like a wound that has been kept dressed for too long, the heart starts to fester and becomes fetid. Eventually, without air, the heart is all but killed off, and there's no feeling, no experiencing at all.To practice forbearance is to appreciate and celebrate the heart's vulnerability, and to see that the slicing or piercing of the heart does not require defense; that the heart's vulnerability is a good thing, because wounds can make us more peaceful and more real—if, that is, we are willing to hang on to the leopard of our fear, the serpent of our grief, the boar of our shame without running away or being hurled off. Forbearance is simply holding on steadfastly with whatever it is that unexpectedly arises: not doing anything; not fixing anything (because doing and fixing can be a way to cover up the heart, to leap over the hurt and pain by occupying ourselves with schemes and plans to get rid of it.) Just holding on for hear life. Holding on with what comes is what makes life dear....Simply holding on this way may sound passive. Forbearance has a bad reputation in our culture, whose conventional wisdom tells us that we ought to solve problems, fix what's broken, grab what we want, speak out, shake things up, make things happen. And should none of this work out, then we are told we ought to move on, take a new tack, start something else. But this line of thinking only makes sense when we are attempting to gain external satisfaction. It doesn't take into account internal well-being; nor does it engage the deeper questions of who you really are and what makes you truly happy, questions that no one can ignore for long... Insofar as forbearance helps us to embrace transformative energy and allow its magic to work on us... forbearance isn't passive at all. It's a powerfully active spiritual force, (67-70).

Norman Fischer

Intimacy between people requires closeness as well as distance. It is like dancing. Sometimes we are very close, touching each other or holding each other; sometimes we move away from each other and let the space between us become an area where we can freely move.To keep the right balance between closeness and distance requires hard work, especially since the needs of the partners may be quite different at a given moment. One might desire closeness while the other wants distance. One might want to be held while the other looks for independence. A perfect balance seldom occurs, but the honest and open search for that balance can give birth to a beautiful dance, worthy to behold.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

I didn’t say a word. He wouldn’t be using oxygen. K2 is more dangerous than Everest.

Susan Oakey-Baker

And that reminds me of another memorable thing Linda once said to me: "There's so much strength in vulnerability. It's the ultimate gift you can give yourself because you allow yourself to open up; to invite someone in.

Kat Von D.

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Vulnerability Quotes

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