Mary J. Blige Quotes

You're gonna meet tons of different people throughout your life, and it's totally worth it to stick your neck out a little bit if you like someone. Even when you get shot down, it seems really devastating, but it's not in the long run.

Vulnerability is not a weakness but a faculty for understanding.

I just had to be strong enough to allow myself to be vulnerable. Great Lesson. For art and for life.

Stripping toughened my hide, but exposing myself as a writer has been a lot more brutal.

Sometimes our strengths are also our weaknesses. Sometimes to be strong you have to first be weak. You have to share your burdens; you have to lean on other people while you face your problems and yourself.

I've learned... that sometimes coming public with certain things, it inspires other people. And sometimes I want to keep things private... but then I found out that it helps other families.

Some people don't take me seriously, so I had to work harder.

I am so honored to be the vessel into which you pour this story of pain and strength.

I was super doubting myself and if I was even cut out to live this life, but then the fans came to my rescue. And I think we all have those moments, but every failure is necessary, especially in the entertainment industry.

When you are free from self-doubt, you fail better. You accept criticism and listen.

I was very vulnerable to criticism for many years. I could read a bad review and remember it my whole life.

I'm never more courageous than when I'm embracing imperfection, embracing vulnerabilities, and setting boundaries with the people in my life.

Everyone feels like an underdog, at some point in their life. Even the best-looking people and the most athletic probably have a phase in their life - a year or two - where they're awkward or they have braces.

When you stop putting yourself on the line, and you don't touch your own heart, how do you expect to touch other people?

Is it a shame that I can’t accept love? Am I too burned out to move towards what will keep me alive or too smart to get pulled into someone else’s world?

I think that, for a lot of us, the closer we get to showing people who we really are, that's where we feel the most uncomfortable, the most vulnerable. But it's also where the healthiest growth comes from. Like when I can really open myself up to someone and show someone who I really am, it's amazing when it happens.

I look very foolish. To a lot of people I look foolish in what I'm doing and I understand that. The only thing that matters is how I feel and if I let how they feel affect me it'll change how I feel.

You could penetrate anybody if you consistently put out love. Some people can't handle it.

Sometimes people need to experience great loss to really be driven deeper.

I'm grateful that I feel the way that I do - to make choices based on a lot of people's feelings - even though it has been hard at times, especially when I was younger, but I feel like it has led me down the right road for me. I'm very happy with what has come of that.

I feel my characters are valid, my characters are people, my characters have hope. Hope is the thing that'll take us through.

Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous.... Vulnerability is the birthplace of connection and the path to the feeling of worthiness. If it doesn't feel vulnerable, the sharing is probably not constructive.

There really is "no effort without error and shortcoming" and there really is no triumph without vulnerability.

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.