"You are only free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"But what we know now is that when we deny our emotion, it owns us. When we own our emotion, we can rebuild and find our way through the pain."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"Courage is forged in pain, but not in all pain. Pain that is denied or ignored becomes fear or hate."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"True belonging doesn't require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"Sometimes the most dangerous thing for kids is the silence that allows them to construct their own stories—stories that almost always cast them as alone and unworthy of love and belonging."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. —JAMES A. BALDWIN"
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"Never underestimate the power of being seen"
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"The connection that we forge by judging and mocking others is not real connection,"
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"People are hard to hate close up. Move in. Speak truth to bullshit. Be civil. Hold hands. With strangers. Strong back. Soft front. Wild heart."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"If I get to be me, I belong. If I have to be like you, I fit in."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness)
"Being ourselves means sometimes having to find the courage to stand alone, totally alone."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"A wild heart is not something you can always see -- and yet it is our greatest spiritual possession."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"People often silence themselves, or "agree to disagree" without fully exploring the actual nature of the disagreement, for the sake of protecting a relationship and maintaining connection. But when we avoid certain conversations, and never fully learn how the other person feels about all of the issues, we sometimes end up making assumptions that not only perpetuate but deepen misunderstandings, and that can generate resentment."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"Art has the power to render sorrow beautiful, make loneliness a shared experience, and transform despair into hope."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"Joseph Campbell wrote, “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"Research shows that playing cards once a week or meeting friends every Wednesday night at Starbucks adds as many years to our lives as taking beta blockers or quitting a pack-a-day smoking habit."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"Lying is a defiance of the truth. Bullshitting is a wholesale dismissal of the truth."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"True belonging has no bunkers. We have to step out from behind the barricades of self-preservation and brave the wild."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"The mark of a wild heart is living out the paradox of love in our lives. It’s the ability to be tough and tender, excited and scared, brave and afraid—all in the same moment. It’s showing up in our vulnerability and our courage, being both fierce and kind."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"And if our faith asks us to find the face of God in everyone we meet, that should include the politicians, media, and strangers on Twitter with whom we most violently disagree. When we desecrate their divinity, we desecrate our own, and we betray our faith."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"True belonging is not passive. It's not the belonging that comes with just joining a group. It's not fitting in or pretending or selling out because it's safer. It's a practice that requires us to be vulnerable, get uncomfortable, and learn how to be present with people without sacrificing who we are. We want true belonging, but it takes tremendous courage to knowingly walk into hard moments."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"When the culture of any organization mandates that it is more important to protect the reputation of a system and those in power than it is to protect the basic human dignity of the individuals who serve that system or who are served by that system, you can be certain that the shame is systemic, the money is driving ethics, and the accountability is all but dead."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"We are complex beings who wake up every day and fight against being labeled and diminished with stereotypes and characterizations that don’t reflect our fullness. Yet when we don’t risk standing on our own and speaking out, when the options laid before us force us into the very categories we resist, we perpetuate our own disconnection and loneliness. When we are willing to risk venturing into the wilderness, and even becoming our own wilderness, we feel the deepest connection to our true self and to what matters the most."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"Even in the context of suffering—poverty, violence, human rights violations—not belonging in our families is still one of the most dangerous hurts. That’s because it has the power to break our heart, our spirit, and our sense of self-worth. It broke all three for me. And when those things break, there are only three outcomes, something I’ve borne witness to in my life and in my work: 1. You live in constant pain and seek relief by numbing it and/or inflicting it on others; 2. You deny your pain, and your denial ensures that you pass it on to those around you and down to your children; or 3. You find the courage to own the pain and develop a level of empathy and compassion for yourself and others that allows you to spot hurt in the world in a unique way. I certainly tried the first two. Only through sheer grace did I make my way to the third."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)
"Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong. You will always find it because you’ve made that your mission. Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don’t negotiate their value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild heart against constant evaluation, especially our own. No one belongs here more than you."
— Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)