Human Vulnerability Quotes & Sayings

These scientific studies countervail the influential claims of the Kants, Nietzsches, and Rands about the nature of human goodness. Compassion is not a blind emotions that catapults people pell-mell toward the next warm body that walks by. Instead, compassion is exquisitely attuned to harm and vulnerability in others. Compassion does not render people tearful idlers, moral weaklings, or passive onlookers but individuals who will take on the pain of others, even when given the chance to skip out on such difficult action or in anonymous conditions. The kindness, sacrifice, and jen that make up healthy communities are rooted in a bundle of nerves that has been producing caretaking behavior for over 100 million years of mammalian evolution. — Dacher Keltner

Just as legendary rivers were used to represent the flow of life, so Mount Athos is a handy image to show human vulnerability. Its minerals themselves reminding us that ours is a planet constituted around Nature's awesome violence! Struggling to survive then, is integral to our existence. Literature on these issues, transforming rock and boulder into a subjective mountain, where fleshly mountaineers set forth, in the blinding brilliance of an alpine dawn, to ascend their own transgressions, remains telling. Breathing in, when nearing the top, to smell the pure air of spiritual comprehension: of heady intrinsic freedom, only to descend, once more, into the obscure and the pedestrian; albeit existentially transformed! In this way, indeed, Mount Athos transfigures many a man. — David William Parry

Human nature means that institutions at some point lose their sense of mission. That sense of vulnerability drives Pimco. — Bill Gross

I think one of the reasons I've had success in hip-hop is that I can bring out vulnerability in people who are generally seen as tough guys. To me, when a hip-hop musician always plays tough, I find it annoying because I know they're not really like that - there's something deeper and vulnerable. There has to be, because they're human beings. — Skylar Grey

And yet it may happen in these most desperate trials of our human existence that beyond any rational explanation, we may feel a nail-scarred Hand clutching ours. We are able, as Etty Hillesun, the Dutch Jewess who died in Auschwitz on November 30, 1943, wrote, "to safeguard that little piece of God in ourselves" and not give way to despair. We make it through the night and darkness gives way to the light of morning. The tragedy radically alters the direction of our lives, but in our vulnerability and defenselessness we experience the power of Jesus in His present risenness. - Abba's Child — Brennan Manning

I wanted Jesus in 'A.D.' to be very, very, very human - to have those qualities of vulnerability and doubt and pain and sadness and loneliness. Once the resurrection happens and we see that Jesus has risen, it's almost complete, right? It's all about the joy and the smile and the happiness and the closeness to the disciples. — Juan Pablo Di Pace

So much of what I love about poetry lies in the vast possibilities of voice, the spectacular range of idiosyncratic flavors that can be embedded in a particular human voice reporting from the field. One beautiful axis of voice is the one that runs between vulnerability and detachment, between 'It hurts to be alive' and 'I can see a million miles from here.' A good poetic voice can do both at once. — Tony Hoagland

Sometimes divulging your vulnerabilities without any kind of filter can make you more human, but then again, it can also provide material that can be used against you. — Tonya Hurley

I am intrigued by the basics of human life, by our vulnerability, our desires, our sexuality - as far as I am concerned, character is expressed through sexuality. Art is able to represent human existence stripped to its essence by showing us the naked human body. — Thomas Koerfer

It takes courage to grieve, to honor the pain we carry. We can grieve in tears or in meditative silence, in prayer or in song. In touching the pain of recent and long-held griefs, we come face to face with our genuine human vulnerability, with helplessness and hopelessness. These are the storm clouds of the heart. — Jack Kornfield

Good pictures. Tragedy and violence certainly make powerful images. It is what we get paid for.But there is a price extracted with every such frame: some of the emotion, the vulnerability, the empathy that makes us human, is lost every time the shutter is released. — Greg Marinovich

We are all members of the same flawed species. Putting our moral vision into practice means imposing our will on others. The human lust for power and esteem, coupled with its vulnerability to self-deception and self-righteousness, makes that an invitation to a calamity, all the worse when the power is directed at a goal as quixotic as eradicating human self-interest. — Steven Pinker

The evolution of the human brain is inextricably interwoven with the expansion of culture and the emergence of language. Thus, it is no coincidence that human beings are story tellers. Through countless generations, humans have gathered to listen to stories of the hunt, the exploits of their ancestors, and morality tales of good and evil...Thus, I believe that both the urge to tell a tale and our vulnerability to being captivate by one are deeply woven into the structures of our brains — Louis Cozolino

I honestly do not know if love vanquishes death as our traditional faiths teach but I do know that our vulnerabilities trump our ideologies and that love leavens the purity and logic of our beliefs propelling us to connect as the fiercely gracious human beings we are. — Irwin Kula

While the rest of the body is covered, the face is naked. The vulnerability of this nakedness issues a profound call for understanding and compassion. The human face is a meeting place of two unknowns: the infinity of the outer world and the unchartered, inner world to which each individual alone has access. This is the night world that lies behind the brightness of the visage. The smile on a face is a surprise or illumination. It is as if the inner night of this hidden world brightens suddenly, when the smile crosses the face. Heidegger — John O'Donohue

Tiko has taught me, a sometimes headstrong and often ferociously independent woman, the importance of interdependence, the importance of taking care, and the importance of being cared for. It's a necessary part of being human and being connected to the world around us that we realize and acknowledge our vulnerability and the vulnerability of all creatures, and that we act in accord with that knowledge. It is critical that we allow the empathetic and altruistic part of ourselves to be the guiding force behind the way that we conduct our lives, whether we give to those less fortunate than ourselves, take care of the magnificent creatures that share our world, work tirelessly to preserve native habitat or separate each strand of an unruly mass of hair so gently that we do not wake our loved one as she sleeps. — Joanna Burger

I love when you take bizarre, non-human things and somehow make them human or accessible. I think that's why I like the practical effects. You can look at a creature and still see vulnerability or the character behind the creature. To get character behind CG creatures, that's so few and far between. — Kevin Munroe

Ours is not a culture that respects the sick, the old or the vulnerable. We strive for independence, competence, and mastery. In embracing such 'frontier' values, we may become intolerant of human wholeness, contemptuous of anything in ourselves, and in others, that has needs or is capable of suffering. The denial of a vulnerability is the ultimate barrier to compassion. — Rachel Naomi Remen

It is almost impossible to fall in love with majesty, power, or perfection. These make us fearful and codependent, but seldom truly loving. On some level, love can only happen between equals, and vulnerability levels the playing field. What Christians believe is that God somehow became our equal when he became the human "Jesus," a name that is, without doubt, the vulnerable name for God. — Richard Rohr

Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny ... it is also her vulnerability. — Susan Sontag

If you are in the closet and fall in love with someone of the same gender, it doesn't automatically remove the shame and fear that's kept you locked away. The love you are experiencing encourages you to face the reality that this is who you really are and also has the power to set you free. The richness, beauty and depths of love can only be fully experienced in a climate of complete openness, honesty and vulnerability. Love, the most powerful of human emotions, is calling you to freedom and wholeness. — Anthony Venn-Brown

The only answer to the question of the meaning of life has to begin from the fact of our human finitude, of our vulnerability and our fallibility. — Simon Critchley

My grandfather had been the ugliest, darkest, foulest, most depraved figure of my childhood, more beast than human, and I had grown up to be him, locked in the basement with my secrets as the rest of the family reveled in the petty and ordinary upstairs. Down there, I saw my black, ancient, ineluctable core exposed, like a crab forced out of its shell--dirty, vulnerable, and obscene. For the first time in my life, I was truly alone. — Marilyn Manson

We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. 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, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our humanity. — Bryan Stevenson

Intimacy in all human relationships - especially with God - can occur only as vulnerability and inadequacy are owned. — Belden C. Lane

How should we judge what we see? More intimately, let us consider the vulnerability of the human body and soul under these circumstances. It's all creation. It's made. It's not a given. — Thomas Struth

All certainty
that comes after the 'original sin' of dismantling the matter-of-fact
world full of routine and short of reflection must be a manufactured
certainty, a blatantly and unashamedly 'made-up' certainty,
burdened with all the inborn vulnerability of human-made decisions. — Zygmunt Bauman

People tend to consider beig vulnerable a bad thing. It's not. Vulnerability reminds us that we're human. It keeps us open to giving and receiving love. Without at least a little, we can become someone living n a prison of our own making, where the walls are so thick that no one can get in or out. — Jodee Blanco

The world we live in is made up of polar opposites, black/white, male/female, night/day, and a human being who possesses both masculine and feminine - vulnerability and strength - is intriguing to us, whether they be a singer or actor or dancer, intrigues us, because THAT Is who we really are. — RuPaul

When dreams are turned away, death becomes the ultimate salvation ... .There are only two extremes in human madness: the instant when you become aware of your own impotence and the instant when you become aware of the vulnerability of others. It's a question of accepting one's madness ... or suffering it. — Yasmina Khadra

I actually think it's harder to play vulnerability, because you're having to delve deeper into portions of your own psyche, what it is that makes you human. — Ron Perlman

We do not become less needy, less dependent when we pray; we become more needy, more dependent, which is to say, more human. — Eugene H. Peterson

I think that one of the things is that, if you are going to decide to be a painter, you have got to decide that you are not going to be afraid of making a fool of yourself. I think another thing is to be able to find subjects which really absorb you to try and do. I feel that without a subject you automatically go back into decoration because you haven't got the subject which is always eating into you to bring it back - and the greatest art always returns you to the vulnerability of the human situation. — Francis Bacon

Humility was an offensive characteristic for a God, in the eyes of early non-Christians. How could Christians worship a God who deliberately chose to share in human birth with all its mess and vulnerability and limitation, as well as a shameful death? How can we now worship a God to whom all the unimportant little details of our lives actually matter? How can we respect a God who takes us more seriously than we take ourselves, and yet is not impressed with all our accomplishments? Who loves us equally well, whetherwe succeed or fail? How could it really be that God simply disregards not only our education, our tastes, our industry, our niceness, our worthiness in order to love us? God's greatness we can begin to approach. The sheer humility of God's love is incomprehensible. — Roberta C. Bondi

Control is an illusion - a fact you will learn very fast if you become ill, or have things fall apart in some other way. When we understand vulnerability and suffering as an essential part of being human, our individual fate can be easier to manage. — Harriet Lerner

Let us remember with humility the loneliness of being man in a universe we do not understand and the vulnerability of the human condition. The animals could do very well without us, but we cannot do without them. — Gerald Carson

Actually," I said, hesitant to bring it up, "I was thinking along the lines of a curse that can turn you human." "Or witch?" Ivy said, surprising me. There was a soft vulnerability in her and I blinked. "You don't want to be a witch," I said quickly. "Why not? You are. — Kim Harrison

Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We — Bryan Stevenson

Storytelling not only makes us human; it creates vulnerability. — Herbert Anderson

In our 'don't just sit there, do something' culture, when we get sick we are supposed to become characters in a heroic medical narrative that conceals the remorselessness of pathology, the intractable fact of human vulnerability, and the inevitable inadequacies of medicine. To many of the participants in the medical drama, aggressive treatment - even when it fails - represents a quasi-religious quest for immortality and meaning. — Suzanne Gordon

Human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are more open than we think, that their behavior cannot be confidently predicted from their past, that we are all creatures vulnerable to new thoughts, new attitudes.
And while such vulnerability creates all sorts of possibilities, both good and bad, its very existence is exciting. It means that no human being should be written off, no change in thinking deemed impossible. — Howard Zinn

She traversed the spectrum of human emotion, and found herself to be flawed, but trusted God to accept all of her. Her vulnerability and openness led to her empowerment. — Helen LaKelly Hunt

THEATRE HAS THE POWER TO MOVE, INSPIRE, TRANSFORM AND EDUCATE IN WAYS THAT NO OTHER ART FORM CAN. THEATRE REFLECTS BOTH THE EXTRAORDINARY DIVERSITY OF CULTURES AND OUR SHARED HUMAN CONDITION, IN ALL ITS VULNERABILITY AND STRENGTH. — Irina Bokova

We are called to be fruitful - not successful, not productive, not accomplished. Success comes from strength, stress, and human effort. Fruitfulness comes from vulnerability and the admission of our own weakness. — Henri Nouwen

It is most often not our strengths, our courage or our successes that bring two human hearts together, but it is often our shared vulnerability, our fears and our common failures that make us one. — Stefanie Schneider

Let them see you cry. Let them see you sweat. Let them see you bleed. Those three drops make you human. Never fear to show your humanity. It's the bravest act of all. — Toni Sorenson

Authentic religion teaches one to imagine the other
to consider another's vulnerability and humanity. The beginning of ethics is this trancendent imagination' (Ingrid Mattson). The message, she said, to be expounded by preacher and politician alike is that all human beings possess a God-given dignity. — Gustav Niebuhr

I think it was the ChapStick that did it; he tasted like ChapStick and Jack Daniels. That reminder of human vulnerability got to me in a way that polished experience wouldn't have. Not that he had lied about the experience. — Josh Lanyon

Most of you have been where I am tonight. The crash site of unrequited love. You ask yourself, How did I get here? What was it about? Was it her smile? Was it the way she crossed her legs, the turn of her ankle, the poignant vulnerability of her slender wrists? What are these elusive and ephemeral things that ignite passion in the human heart? That's an age-old question. It's perfect food for thought on a bright midsummer's night. — Sybil Adelman

Vulnerability isn't a bad thing. Everyone's vulnerable and it only makes you human. — Benjamin Stone

In the first book of the Bible it is written that: "The Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart."
In another translation it is written like this: "God was sorry that he had made the human race in the first place; it broke his heart."
"It grieved him to his heart."
"It broke his heart."
We grieved him to his heart.
We broke his heart.
God's heart can be ... broken?
You cannot love without being vulnerable - because love involves the risk of the person you're loving not loving you back, of rejecting you - and that hurts.
That grieves you to your heart.
God had created man, and He loved them - but they didn't love Him back, and it broke His heart. — Cole Ryan

Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities, the political, the religious, the educational authorities who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing, forming in our minds their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open-mindedness; chaotic, confused, vulnerability to inform yourself. — Timothy Leary

Alienation results because human beings speak the same language only when they appear to each other as they really are, vulnerable, without impressively constructed towers. Vulnerability is that space within which human beings can truly meet each other and speak the same language. Sin and pride serve to destroy this space and drive us away from each other, leaving us to babble in our own language as we scatter to our respective corners of the earth. — Ronald Rolheiser

To be human is necessarily to be a vulnerable risk-taker; to be a courageous human is to be good at it — Jonathan Lear

Vulnerability is the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experience. — Brene Brown

There are a lot of guys who think that if they show weakness or vulnerability they're not sexy anymore or attractive. In my opinion, you can't be too open or too gentle or kind or sensitive. If you really want to work on a relationship and have one that lasts, you have to be willing to go deep into human psychology and emotion. If you don't want to go there, you can be a serial dater, and I guess that's okay, but if you want a relationship with a woman, you have to be introspective and look at yourself and your family and where you've been and where you're going. — Megan Fox

Companies selling a product play down its vulnerability and emphasize its robustness. But only after technology leaves the dock is it really tested. For human operators in control of a supposedly infallible system, complacency and overconfidence can take over, and caution may be thrown to the wind. — Henry Petroski

'And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants to be.' — Max Barry

If manifestations of her love are overwhelming and sometimes seem imprudent, it's because the intensity of such caring doesn't exist in other areas of life. Ma does not love from behind a protective shield. I'm incapable of opening up to people in the way she does. Ma isn't afraid of being vulnerable and doesn't measure relationships in terms of what she can gain. If her feelings are hurt, she doesn't hide the pain or seek revenge. She stumbles over the setback as though it's one of life's quirky tests of fortitude and moves on without storing any resentment. — Adib Khan

Perfect and bulletproof are seductive, but they don't exist in the human experience. We must walk into the arena, whatever it may be - a new relationship, an important meeting, our creative process, or a difficult family conversation - with courage and the willingness to engage. Rather than sitting on the sidelines and hurling judgment and advice, we must dare to show up and let ourselves be seen. This is vulnerability. This is daring greatly. — Brene Brown

Most of us fall in love with someone's persona and spend the next three to five years discovering who that person really is. If you can stay connected through that process of raw vulnerability, I think you have a shot at the prize of knowing and accepting another human being for who and what they really are after years of highs and lows. — Jennifer Aniston

Her heart is no longer hers, it belongs to him, in all its brokenness and vulnerability. She prays that he protects it and doesn't finish the job, completely destroying it. — Karen-Anne Stewart

A leader, first and foremost, is human. Only when we have the strength to show our vulnerability can we truly lead. — Simon Sinek

Spirituality emerged as a fundamental guidepost in Wholeheartedness. Not religiosity but the deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to one another by a force greater than ourselves
a force grounded in love and compassion. For some of us that's God, for others it's nature, art, or even human soulfulness. I believe that owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred. Perhaps embracing vulnerability and overcoming numbing is ultimately about the care and feeding of our spirits. — Brene Brown

To nurture a resilient human being, or a resilient city, is to build in an expectation of adversity, a capacity for inevitable vulnerability. As a word and as a strategy, resilience honors the unromantic reality of who we are and how we are, and so becomes a refreshingly practical compass for the systems and societies we can craft. It's a shift from wish-based optimism to reality-based hope. It is akin to meaningful, sustained happiness - not dependent on a state of perfection or permanent satisfaction, not an emotional response to circumstances of the moment, but a way of being that can meet the range of emotions and experiences, light and dark, that add up to a life. Resilience is at once proactive, pragmatic, and humble. It knows it needs others. It doesn't overcome failure so much as transmute it, integrating it into the reality that evolves. Such — Krista Tippett

We can be confident in our dealings with the world when what the world sees is the outer person, with all the outer person's defences: the intimacy of a love affair is a different matter altogether. And who might not feel just the slightest bit insecure under the gaze of a lover
a gaze which falls on birthmarks, on blemishes physical and psychological, on our imperfections and impatience, on our human vulnerability? — Alexander McCall Smith

The people I know who suffer from mental illness, sometimes they do connect you to what it is to be really human. There's a vulnerability there, there's something very potent. — Maya Forbes

Sometimes being vulnerable as a child is not knowing what lies ahead. We think our choices will make a huge difference in our lives because our parents and other elders spend so much time making sure we think before we act and make our minds up about what we want to be "when we grow up". Some are already at that stage early on, some are not. We learn the ways of the world all in good time, but being vulnerable is to be human. We never stop. — Cyndi Goodgame

Listening is a rare happening among human beings. You cannot listen to the word another is speaking if you are preoccupied with your appearance or impressing the other, or if you are trying to decide what you are going to say when the other stops talking, or if you are debating about whether the word being spoken is true or relevant or agreeable. Such matters may have their place, but only after listening to the word as the word is being uttered. Listening, in other words, is a primitive act of love, in which a person gives self to another's word, making self accessible and vulnerable to that word. — William Stringfellow

Anything that we're connecting with that's happening right now, there's an obvious vulnerability - because we're just fragile human beings in the middle of a just-now expression. — Jason Mraz

I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be "only human," subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief. — Don DeLillo

I'm interested in human vulnerability. We are alone, and my portraits reflect this quality. I don't want anything to get in the way of this feeling. — Thomas S. Buechner