Photo: YourTango
By Aria Gmitter — Written on Mar 15, 2021
Do you ever feel more vulnerable than you do strong? Lots of women struggle with imposter syndrome — that feeling of vulnerability you get when you are certain the world will discover you're not as strong as you pretend to be.
What does it mean to be vulnerable?
Vulnerability, or being vulnerable, is all about your foundation of self-confidence. Once you own your fears and embrace them, you are grounded in the strength of truth.
We are taught to put on a game face and hide our fears. When we do this, we miss out on realizing that our strengths come from the lessons fear teaches us about strength and overcoming fear of vulnerability.
Vulnerability is attractive as it allows you to always find your deepest core strengths at the very moment when the going gets hard.
You can express vulnerability in each and every one of your life experiences and they can show you that other paths can and do exist, so why not take the stronger one and let your vulnerability shine through?
To help you keep this in mind, we've gathered some of the most powerful vulnerability quotes that prove it only makes you stronger.
1. "What makes you vulnerable makes you beautiful." — Brene Brown
2. "We're never so vulnerable than when we trust someone - but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy." — Frank Crane
3. "Emotional pain cannot kill you, but running from it can. Allow. Embrace. Let yourself feel. Let yourself heal." — Vironika Tugaleva
4. "Sometimes we must yield control to others and accept our vulnerability so we can be healed." — Kathy Magliato
5. “To share your weakness is to make yourself vulnerable; to make yourself vulnerable is to show your strength.” — Crissi Jami
6. "If we’re wrapping ourselves up to conceal any vulnerability, whatever happens to us has to go through all those extra layers. Sometimes love doesn’t even reach where we truly live." — Alexandra Katehakis
7. "People can be at their most vulnerable, but still tenacious at the same time." — Toni Bernhard
8. "Vulnerability really means to be strong and secure enough within yourself that you are able to walk outside without your armor on. You are able to show up in life as just you. That is genuine strength and courage. Armor may look tough, but all it does is mask insecurity and fear." — Alaric Hutchinson
9. “The strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility.” — Paulo Coelho
10. "You can’t find intimacy—you can’t find home—when you’re always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood." — Junot Díaz
11. "Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path." — Brené Brown
12. "True safety was not in having armor. It was in vulnerability." — Jewel
13. “What happens when people open their hearts? They get better.” ― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
14. "She is a beautiful, powerful badass woman who sometimes falls apart inside after she drops her bags by the door and tosses her stilettos. Her vulnerability at night helps her to rise stronger in the morning." — J. Autherine
15. "We need to rebrand vulnerability and emotion. A vulnerable man is not some weird anomaly. He is open to being hurt, but also open to love." — Grayson Perry
16. "We can only experience the true beauty of vulnerability when we're courageous enough to crack open the fractures in our mask and allow the light to shine in." — Alicya Perreault
17. “We are at our most powerful the moment we no longer need to be powerful.” ― Eric Michael Leventhal
18. "If you’ve created a work culture where vulnerability isn’t okay, you’ve also created a culture where innovation and creativity aren’t okay." — Brené Brown
19. “When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker … but as survivors.” — Jenny Lawson
20. “You can change the world again, instead of protecting yourself from it.” ― Julien Smith, The Flinch
21. “I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.” — Anne Morrow Lindberg
22. "To love is to be vulnerable." — C.S. Lewis
23. “We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness, even if our brokenness is not equivalent […] Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, foreswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.” — Bryan Stevenson
24. "Being vulnerable is the only way to allow your heart to feel true pleasure." — Bob Marley
25. “Allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling. Notice any labels you attach to crying or feeling vulnerable. Let go of the labels. Just feel what you are feeling, all the while cultivating moment-to-moment awareness.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
26. "Vulnerability is scary but pure. In it you can find bravery." — Raquel Franco
27. “I am vulnerable; that’s why I fight.” — Ronda Rousey
28. "I found that the more truthful and vulnerable I was, the more empowering it was for me." — Alanis Morissette
29. “My hope is that in these last moments he’ll show me the vulnerable and tender underbelly of his self, but this isn’t happening, yet, and I’m a fool to think that it will. This is the way it has gone from the beginning: every time we get close to something meaningful, serious, or delicate, he tells a joke. There is a never a yes or no, what do you think, here, according to me, is the meaning of life.” — Daniel Wallace
30. "Let your heart crumble into an infinite amount of tiny, precious seeds. Then plant love everywhere you go." — Anita Krizzan
31. “We are all vulnerable in love. We are more emotionally naked with those we love and sometimes, inevitably, we hurt each other with careless words or actions.” — Sue Johnson
32. "Your weirdness will make you stronger." — Andrea Balt
33. “June has never looked more beautiful than she does now, unadorned and honest, vulnerable yet invincible.” — Marie Lu
34. "Open your hands if you want to be held." — Rumi
35. “I can’t seem to keep my heart from leaking out of the cracks, like sand clutched in a fist.” — Kiersten White
36. "Where you ache to be recognized, allow yourself to be seen." — Toko-pa Turner
37. “By throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your heard even, you experience them fully and completely.” — Mitch Albom
38. "We are never so vulnerable as when we love." — Sigmund Freud
39. “Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.” — Brené Brown
40. "There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve." — William S. Burroughs
41. “If he was vulnerable he was mortal, and if we could wound him we could kill him.” — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
42. "In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing." — Vincent Van Gogh
43. “But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve. For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.” — Shakespeare
44. "The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed." — Ernest Hemingway
45. “If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.” — Mitch Albom
46. "Continue to share your heart with people even if it's been broken." — Amy Poehler
47. “Sometimes what makes us insecure and vulnerable becomes the fuel we need to be overachievers. The antidote for a snakebite is made from the poison, and the thing that made you go backward is the same force that will push you forward.” — T. D. Jakes
48. "She was vulnerable when it came to him. He had crashed through her universe kissing her soul." — N.R. Hart
49. "A woman who opens her heart to love you when it’s already broken is braver than any person you’ll meet." — Steven Benson
50. "The older I become the more I dream of a world where I don’t need so much armor."— J.M. Storm
51. “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” — C.S. Lewis
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Aria Gmitter, M.S, M.F.A., is YourTango's Senior Editor of Horoscopes and Spirituality. She studies with the Midwestern School of Astrology and is a member of the South Florida Astrological Association.