Quotes About Vulnerability

J'ai lentement déshabillé son apparence pour savoir qui elle était. (Dix-huit ans, p.143)

J'ai tenté d'être face à elle un homme fort conscient de ses faiblesses, un homme vêtu qui ne craint pas sa nudité, un homme droit qui connaît ses courbes et ses fractures. Tout ce chemin que j'ai fait pour la rencontrer m'a permis de me parcourir moi-même, c'est long de se parcourir.

Mi padre me enseñó que un padre puede llorar delante de sus hijos, que eso otorga un valor a las lágrimas que los niños no conocen, porque los lloros infantiles son siempre caprichosos, intrascendentes, oportunistas. Pero las lágirmas de un padre son de plomo

Strength is the willingness to take risks in a relationship, to disclose yourself with the intention of building a better relationship.

I have a pathological fear of being on my own. When I'm with my own thoughts, I start to unravel myself, and I start to think really dark thoughts, self-destructive thoughts.

I'm too young to die.

when a person hides their motives, they hide themselves;

My hopes was that by me writing my demons out, I'd be conquering one of the most important steps… admittance.

Never be too willing to expose yourself to your weaknesses. Find ways to curve your weaknesses by forming buffers between your vices and your heart.

Iniziamo a essere credibili nel momento in cui siamo trasparenti e ammettiamo di essere non infallibili.

Strange isn't it, people spend their time making nice things and other people come along and brake them.

Poetry is language against which you have no defenses.

Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.

In real pain we have no other choice but to learn to ask for help and on a daily basis. Pain tells us we belong and cannot live forever alone or in isolation. Pain makes us understand reciprocation.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

Humiliation is mostly something we try to avoid, but it is something more often, all for the best, in retrospect. There is a lovely root to the word, the Latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returned to the ground of our being. Any fancy ideas we have about ourselves are shriven away by the reality of the moment. We come to earth with a thump. It may be a narrow piece of ground, but at least it is real and at least it is our own.

Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are.

Poetry: Language against which we have no defences.

Work is freighted with difficulty and possibility of visible failure, failure to provide, to succeed, to make a difference, to be seen and to be seen to be seen. Work, therefore is robust vulnerability, and a good part of the time, a journey leading us through very unbeautiful private and public humiliations.

after all, the identity of the one who must forgive is actually founded on the very fact of having been wounded.

In many ways love has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it, before we can utter the right words or understand what has happened to us or is continuing to happen to us: an invitation to the most difficult art of all, to love without naming at all.

To go beyond our normal identities and become closer than close is to lose our sense of self in temporary joy: a form of arrival that only opens us to deeper forms of intimacy that blur our fixed, controlling, surface identity.

Cavanaugh says to be constantly describing yourself and to think you know who you are and to be constantly explaining to others is a gospel of despair. To be yourself and to put yourself in conversation with others and to overhear yourself saying things you didn't know you knew, this is more like the truth, this is more like the poetic imagination … and the weakness of the prose, according to Cavanaugh, is the person who tries to get to a given goal in a staight line.