Courage is like—it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: You get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.

Our capacity for wholeheartednes s can never be greater than our willingness to be broken-hearted.

Shame works like the zoom lens on a camera. When we are feeling shame, the camera is zoomed in tight and all we see is our flawed selves, alone and struggling.(page 68)

It's about showing up. And sometimes I don't do it. I almost always regret it, but sometimes I don't do it. Sometimes I walk into a situation where I'm intimidated and I want to be liked and I want to fit in, and I don't choose authenticity. And it's always pretty miserable.

Shame is the most powerful, master emotion. It's the fear that we're not good enough.

I define vulnerability as uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. With that definition in mind, let’s think about love. Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can’t ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment’s notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow—that’s vulnerability.

Worrying about scarcity is our culture's version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we've been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal (which requires vulnerability) we're angry and scared and at each other's throats.