Quotes About Vulnerability

We're never so vulnerable than when we trust someone - but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy.

Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

It is too embarrassing to name and own one's deep failings; as long as they are unvoiced, we may be allowed to pretend it is not so.

Humanness depends on being faithfully heard. And being faithfully heard depends on risky speech of self-disclosure uttered in freedom before a faithful listener.

Grief is an element of aliveness and the answer to the denial the market demands of us. It is an index of our humanity. It is proof of the presence of our relatedness to each other. It is a communal practice that recognizes that choosing the wilderness of vulnerability, mystery, and anxiety was a good and life-affirming choice.

Peace requires the capacity to forgive. Peace requires a readiness to share generously. Peace requires the violation of strict class stratification in society. Peace requires attentiveness to the vulnerable and the unproductive. Peace requires humility in the face of exaltation, being last among those who insist on being first and denying self in the interest of the neighbor. These are all practices that mark his presence in his society.

Anger is the fluid love bleeds when you cut it.

When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.

I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

power becomes a slave to passion so easily, and to an unacknowledged passion easiest of all.

it isn't passions that make us weak, but rather uncontrollable passions.

Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be blank and be filled in.

I better stop thinking in this manner, or before I know where I am I'll be bursting into tears, and it's a nice thing getting homesick before you even leave a place at all, so it is.

Love makes you blind to your own survival. And if it doesn't then it's not love at all.

Jalil Gibrán: «Si no se rompe, ¿cómo logrará abrirse tu coraz

Es muy difícil amar a quien no se deja y convencerlo de que es querible.

De alguna manera, los individuos ventajosos y desconsiderados detectan a los mansos/dependientes, los desnudan en la relación cara a cara, los descubren en la mirada huidiza, en el tono de voz apagado, la postura tensa, los gestos conciliadores, los circunloquios, las disculpas y la amabilidad excesiva. Los ubican, los ponen en la mira y atacan. Insisto, la idea no es crear un estilo prevenido y dejar de creer en la humanidad, sino adoptar un actitud previsora.

El amor no es tan poderoso.

Ésa es la esencia del cambio: aceptar que más allá de las apariencias, en el resguardo más escondido de la humanidad que cargamos, hay un sitio especial en el que somos tan crudamente iguales, tan desesperadamente humanos, tan misteriosamente frágiles, que nadie merece sentirse inferior. No hay otra forma de vencer la vergüenza privada que aceptarse incondicionalmente, a pesar de todo, y de todos.

ser tú mismo con la mayor intensidad posible

La valentía no es el roble majestuoso que ve ir y venir las tormentas; es el frágil retoño de una flor que se abre en la nieve.

No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken, Than that the largest heart is soonest broken.