Brené Brown · 138 pages
Rating: (61.5K votes)
“We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.
Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.
Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed and rare.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It's about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It's our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it's often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“To love someone fiercely, to believe in something with your whole heart, to celebrate a fleeting moment in time, to fully engage in a life that doesn’t come with guarantees – these are risks that involve vulnerability and often pain. But, I’m learning that recognizing and leaning into the discomfort of vulnerability teaches us how to live with joy, gratitude and grace.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Perfectionism is a self destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Healthy striving is self-focused: "How can I improve?" Perfectionism is other-focused: "What will they think?”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated. This is why we sometimes attack who they are, which is far more hurtful than addressing a behavior or a choice.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“If we share our shame story with the wrong person, they can easily become one more piece of flying debris in an already dangerous storm.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Staying vulnerable is a risk we have to take if we want to experience connection.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning and purpose to our lives.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“We're a nation hungry for more joy: Because we're starving from a lack of gratitude.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Until we can receive with an open heart, we're never really giving with an open heart. When we attach judgment to receiving help, we knowingly or unknowingly attach judgment to giving help.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“One of the greatest barriers to connection is the cultural importance we place on "going it alone." Somehow we've come to equate success with not needing anyone. Many of us are willing to extend a helping hand, but we're very reluctant to reach out for help when we need it ourselves. It's as if we've divided the world into "those who offer help" and "those who need help." The truth is that we are both.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“The universe is not short on wake-up calls. We’re just quick to hit the snooze button.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Shame works like the zoom lens on a camera. When we are feeling shame, the camera is zoomed in tight and all we see is our flawed selves, alone and struggling.(page 68)”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Until we can receive with an open heart, we are never really giving with an open heart.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Here's what is truly at the heart of wholeheartedness: Worthy now, not if, not when, we're worthy of love and belonging now. Right this minute. As is.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“E.E Cummings wrote, "To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody but yourself - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight- and never stop fighting.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Cruelty is easy, cheap and rampant.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Sufficiency isn't two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn't a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn't an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Courage is like—it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: You get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else's hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that "I'm only human" does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Perfectionism is self destructive simply because there's no such thing as perfect. Perfection is an unattainable goal.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“Hope is not an emotion; it's a way of thinking or a cognitive process.”
― Brené Brown, quote from The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
Brené Brown
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“كل واحد منا إنسان , بشر, أي أنه مجرد محاولة, مجرد شئ في منتصف الطريق. و علي الإنسان أن يكون في منتصف الطريق المؤدي إلي الكمال و أن يسعي لبلوغ المركز لا الحافة.”
― Hermann Hesse, quote from The Glass Bead Game
“Name one hero who was happy.”
― Madeline Miller, quote from The Song of Achilles
“In the end mortals always expired before faeries. They were such finite creatures. Their first heartbeat and breath were but a blink from death. To add the weight of nourishing his insatiable court in a time of peace was to hasten that unconscionably.”
― Melissa Marr, quote from Ink Exchange
“What was a slap for ten pages of escapism, ten pages far from everything that made him unhappy, ten pages of real life instead of the monotony that other people called the real world?”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from Inkdeath
“In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in the tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she’d wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had take her away from nothing, there’d been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”
― Thomas Pynchon, quote from The Crying of Lot 49
The Fifth Elephant
Roadside Picnic
Furies of Calderon
Towers of Midnight
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