Brave Enough Quotes

“Hello, fear. Thank you for being here. You’re my indication that I’m doing what I need to do.”

“To love and be loved. That is the meaning of life.”

“Be brave enough to break your own heart.”

“If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease. We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.”

“Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don’t always do the right thing on our way to rightness.”

“There are so many things to be tortured about. So many torturous things in this life. Don’t let someone who doesn’t love you be one of them.”

“We don’t reach the mountaintop from the mountaintop. We start at the bottom and climb up. Blood is involved.”

“Ask yourself: What is the best I can do? And then do that.”

“The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way.”

“You are grieving because you loved truly.”

“Accept that sorrow and strife are part of even a joyful life.”

“Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life.”

“It’s folly to measure your success in money or fame. Success is measured only by your ability to say yes to these two questions: Did I do the work I needed to do? Did I give it everything I had?”

“What if I forgave myself? What if I forgave myself even though I’d done some things I shouldn’t have? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything different from what I’d done? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if all those things I shouldn’t have done were what got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?”

“Our most meaningful relationships are often those that continued beyond the juncture at which they came closest to ending.”

“That place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. It’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really hard to get there, but you can do it.”

“When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them? THE WORD FOR THAT IS HEALING.”

“The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way.”

“Transformation doesn’t ask that you stop being you. It demands that you find a way back to the authenticity and strength that’s already inside of you. You only have to bloom.”

“This is not the moment to wilt into the underbrush of your insecurities. You’ve earned the right to grow.”