Iyanla Vanzant
27 quotes
Biography
Iyanla Vanzant is an American inspirational speaker, lawyer, New Thought spiritual teacher, author, life coach, and television personality. She is known primarily for her books, her eponymous talk show, and her appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
"I hope that my story, I hope that my life is... an encouragement for people, especially in Brooklyn. I feel humbled and blessed."
"241 quotes from Iyanla Vanzant: 'Everything that happens to you is a reflection of what you believe about yourself. We cannot outperform our level of sel."
"You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people, but until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them"
"The only way to get what you really want is to let go of what you don't want."
"When you need to be loved, you take love wherever you can find it. When you are desperate to be loved, feel love, know love, you seek out what you think love should look like. When you find love, or what you think love is, you will lie, kill, and steal to keep it. But learning about real love comes from within. It cannot be given. It cannot be taken away. It grows from your ability to re-create within yourself, the essence of loving experiences you have had in your life.thumb|Visit of Iyanla Vanzant to HUD (cropped)"
"When you need to be loved, you take love wherever you can find it. When you are desperate to be loved, feel love, know love, you seek out what you think love should look like. When you find love, or what you think love is, you will lie, kill, and steal to keep it. But learning about real love comes from within. It cannot be given. It cannot be taken away. It grows from your ability to re-create within yourself, the essence of loving experiences you have had in your life."
"If you are afraid to take a chance, take one anyway. What you don't do can create the same regrets as the mistakes you make."
"Fear wears so many clever disguises it is virtually impossible to always recognize it. Fear disguises itself as the need to be somewhere else, doing something else, not knowing how to do something or not needing to do something."
"Education does not take place when you learn something you did not know before. Education is your ability to use what you have learned to be better today than you were yesterday."
"Everything that happens to you is a reflection of what you believe about yourself. We cannot outperform our level of self-esteem. We cannot draw to ourselves more than we think we are worth."
"I have learned the hard way to mind my business, without judging who people are and what they do. I am more troubled by the lack of space being provided for the truth to unfold. Humans cannot seem to wait for or honor the truth. Instead, we make it up based on who we believe people should or should not be."
"Some of us pray demands. Some of us pray complaints. Some of us pray knowing, and some of us pray not knowing. But prayer is the attitude that you hold in your heart."
"If you are a card-carrying human being, chances are that you share the same fear as all other humans: the fear of losing love, respect and connection to others. And if you are human, in order to avoid or prevent the pain, trauma and perceived devastation of the loss, you will do anything to avoid your greatest fear from being visited on you."
"In my deepest, darkest moments, what really got me through was a prayer. Sometimes my prayer was 'Help me.' Sometimes a prayer was 'Thank you.' What I've discovered is that intimate connection and communication with my creator will always get me through because I know my support, my help, is just a prayer away."
"I try not to set myself up as different or as a celebrity or special. I have a husband that can get on my nerves. I have kids that test my patience. I've got a cat I can't keep off the sofa. It's real. On a bad day, I'm reading 'Acts of Faith.'"
"I wasn't ready for fame and all that brings to your life. It was an amazing experience, but so overwhelming, because no one can tell you beforehand when it will happen or how it will impact you. So no one can tell you how to handle it, being stopped everywhere you go because people saw you on 'Oprah.' It took me over, and I wasn't ready."
"I gave myself permission to feel and experience all of my emotions. In order to do that, I had to stop being afraid to feel. In order to do that, I taught myself to believe that no matter what I felt or what happened when I felt it, I would be okay."
"What a blessing that God allows a life to come through your body, and then allows you to place that body in a body bag and take it out. I had to say that there's a magnificent something that God has for me to do, to give me that level of completion. That level of experience. It's unspeakable."
"Everyone has something that blocks us from the full experience and expression of our nobility."
"Pain is pain, hurt is hurt, fear is fear, anger is anger, and it has no color."
"In my mind, marriage is a spiritual partnership and union in which we willingly give and receive love, create and share intimacy, and open ourselves to be available and accessible to another human being in order to heal, learn and grow."
"The remedy for life's broken pieces is not classes, workshops or books. Don't try to heal the broken pieces. Just forgive."
"Whether at work, at home or in public, we have been trained to believe that who we are at the core of our being is often unacceptable. As a result, we work diligently to live up to - and sometimes down to - what others have made us out to be, whether or not it is an accurate reflection of who we are."
"I don't think there's such a thing as a selfish prayer. Prayer puts you in communication so you can talk about whatever you want to talk about."
"I had no preconceived idea what fame would be like, because I never thought I would be famous. I just wanted to do my work. Hell, I just wanted to pay my rent on time."