Top 200 Brené Brown Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Loving and accepting ourselves are the ultimate acts of courage.”

— Brené Brown

152. “We can only belong when we offer our most authentic selves and when we’re embraced for who we are.”

— Brené Brown

153. “The universe is not short on wake-up calls. We’re just quick to hit the snooze button.”

— Brené Brown

154. “If we share our shame story with the wrong person, they can easily become one more piece of flying debris in an already dangerous storm.”

— Brené Brown

155. “Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it- it can’t survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy. When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes.”

— Brené Brown

156. “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.”

— Brené Brown

157. “Shame derives its power from being unspeakable.”

— Brené Brown

158. “If we can’t stand up to the never good enough and who do you think you are? we can’t move forward.”

— Brené Brown

159. “It’s no longer a question of can I do it. It’s a question of: Do I want to do it?”

— Brené Brown

160. “Men walk this tightrope where any sign of weakness illicits shame, and so they’re afraid to make themselves vulnerable for fear of looking weak.”

— Brené Brown

161. “We are the authors of our lives. We write our own daring endings.”

— Brené Brown

162. “I only share when I have no unmet needs that I’m trying to fill. I firmly believe that being vulnerable with a larger audience is only a good idea if the healing is tied to the sharing, not to the expectations I might have for the response I get.”

— Brené Brown

163. “We cannot grow when we are in shame, and we can’t use shame to change ourselves or others.”

— Brené Brown

164. “It’s hard to practice compassion when we’re struggling with our authenticity or when our own worthiness is off-balance.”

— Brené Brown

165. “When we stop caring about what people think, we lose our capacity for connection. When we become defined by what people think, we lose our willingness to be vulnerable.”

— Brené Brown

166. “Love is a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.”

— Brené Brown

167. “Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy.”

— Brené Brown

168. “We are so busy that the truth about our lives can’t catch up.”

— Brené Brown

169. “I believe joy is a spiritual practice.”

— Brené Brown

170. “First and foremost, we need to be the adults we want our children to be. We should watch our own gossiping and anger. We should model the kindness we want to see.”

— Brené Brown

171. “There is no intimacy without vulnerability. Yet another powerful example of vulnerability as courage.”

— Brené Brown

172. “Perfect and bulletproof are seductive, but they don’t exist in the human experience.”

— Brené Brown

173. “In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. In fact, the need to make up a story, especially when we are hurt, is part of our most primitive survival wiring. Mean making is in our biology, and our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense, feels familiar, and offers us insight into how best to self-protect.”

— Brené Brown

174. “Courage is telling our story, not being immune to criticism.”

— Brené Brown

175. “Through my research, I found that vulnerability is the glue that holds relationships together. It’s the magic sauce.”

— Brené Brown

176. “Faith minus vulnerability and mystery equals extremism. If you’ve got all the answers, then don’t call what you do ‘faith.’”

— Brené Brown

177. “We teach what we have to learn. It’s been an extraordinary journey that I couldn’t have done with not only the research participants but the community, the tribe that we’ve built of people who are also on this journey.”

— Brené Brown

178. “Vulnerability pushed, I pushed back. I lost the fight, but probably won my life back.”

— Brené Brown

179. “When we’re defined by what people think we lose the courage to be vulnerable.”

— Brené Brown

180. “When you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak.”

— Brené Brown

181. “Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting.”

— Brené Brown

182. “It’s in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous.”

— Brené Brown

183. “There really is “no effort without error and shortcoming” and there really is no triumph without vulnerability.”

— Brené Brown

184. “Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn’t a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.”

— Brené Brown

185. “We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time.”

— Brené Brown

186. “I wasn’t really testing it on myself as much as I was learning from other people about what it meant to live and love with your whole heart, and then thinking, oh my god, I’m not doing that.”

— Brené Brown

187. “We need to change what we say and what we allow to be said in front of us.”

— Brené Brown

188. “If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”

— Brené Brown

189. “When the people we love stop paying attention, trust begins to slip away and hurt starts seeping in.”

— Brené Brown

190. “But I don’t think it’s as dangerous, scary, or terrifying as getting to the end of our lives and wondering, what if I would have shown up?”

— Brené Brown

191. “I’m slowing learning how to straddles the tension that comes with understanding I am tough and tender, brave and afraid, strong and struggling-all of these things, all of he time. I’m working on letting go of having to be one or the other and embracing the wholeness of wholeheartedness.”

— Brené Brown

192. “Even to me the issue of “stay small, sweet, quiet, and modest” sounds like an outdated problem, but the truth is that women still run into those demands whenever we find and use our voices.”

— Brené Brown

193. “Social success is growing into a person that other people can depend on.”

— Brené Brown

194. “The one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we’re not worthy of connection.”

— Brené Brown

195. “You can’t dress rehearse the bad moments.”

— Brené Brown

196. “We’re raising children who have little tolerance for disappointment.”

— Brené Brown

197. “Think about what’s pleasurable, not just what’s possible.”

— Brené Brown

198. “Hope is really a thought.”

— Brené Brown

199. “Cool is the emotional straightjacket. It makes us less available for connection which makes us less equipped for leadership roles.”

— Brené Brown

200. “What makes something better is connection.”

— Brené Brown