607 Quotes by Brené Brown

When you look away from a homeless person, you diminish their humanity and your own.

Maybe looking away is about privilege. I need to think harder and longer about my choices and recognize that choosing whom I see and whom I don't see is one of the most hurtful functions of privilege.

If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive.

No one reaches out to you for compassion or empathy so you can teach them how to behave better. They reach out to us because they believe in our capacity to know our darkness well enough to sit in the dark with them.

Courage has a ripple effect. Every time we choose courage, we make everyone around us a little better and the world a little braver. And our world could stand to be a little kinder and braver.

After doing this work or the past twelve years and watching scarcity ride roughshod over our families, organizations, and communities, I'd say the one thing we have in common is that we're sick of feeling afraid. we want to dare greatly. We're tired of the national conversation centering on "What should we fear" and "Who should we blame?" We all want to be brave.

Like courage, empathy and compassion are critical components of shame resilience. Practicing compassion allows us to hear shame. Empathy, the most powerful tool of compassion, is an emotional skill that allows us to respond to others in a meaningful, caring way. Empathy is the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes - to understand what someone is experiencing and to reflect back that understanding.

Requiring accountability while also extending your compassion is not the easiest course of action, but it is the most humane, and, ultimately, the safest for the community.

When we spend our lives waiting until we are perfect or bulletproof before we walk into the arena, we ultimately sacrifice relationships and opportunities that may not be recoverable. We squander our precious time and we turn our backs on our gifts- those unique contributions that only we can make. Perfect and bulletproof are seductive but they don't exist in the human experience.