Brianna Wiest > Quotes

“Your new life is going to cost you your old one.
It’s going to cost you your comfort zone and your sense
of direction.
It’s going to cost you relationships and friends.
It’s going to cost you being liked and understood.
It doesn’t matter.
The people who are meant for you are going to meet you
on the other side. You’re going to build a new comfort
zone around the things that actually move you forward.
Instead of being liked, you’re going to be loved. Instead of
being understood, you’re going to be seen.
All you’re going to lose is what was built for a person you
no longer are.”
― Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

“Love someone because their soul inspires you, not because you’re interested in the relief from loneliness and companionship they can provide. Anybody can do that. Not just anybody can show you to yourself.”
― Brianna Wiest

“The worst happened, and then it passed. You lost the person you thought you couldn’t live without and then you kept living. You lost your job then found another one. You began to realize that “safety” isn’t in certainty—but in faith that you can simply keep going.”
― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

“It is very hard to show up as the person you want to be when you are surrounded by an environment that makes you feel like a person you aren’t.”
― Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

“Everything is hard in some way. It’s hard to be in the wrong relationship. It’s hard to be in the right one. It’s hard to be broke and miserable, it’s hard to achieve your dreams. It’s hard to be stuck in the middle, not really feeling anything at all. Everything is hard, but you choose your hard. You choose what’s worth it. You don’t choose whether or not you’ll suffer, but you do choose what you want to suffer for.”
― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

“The things you love about others are the things you love about yourself. The things you hate about others are the things you cannot see in yourself.”
― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

“Happy people know suffering more than anyone else, and that’s how they can see just how damn beautiful their lives are. It’s because they’ve seen the depths.”
― Brianna Wiest

“Either way, mental strength is not just hoping that nothing ever goes wrong. It is believing that we have the capacity to handle it if it does.”
― Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

“People will come and go as they are scheduled to. Let them. Holding on does not affect them, only you.”
― Brianna Wiest

“The greatest act of self-love is to no longer accept a life you are unhappy with.”
― Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

“The key to finding happiness in this life is realizing that the only way to overcome is to transcend; to find happiness in the simple pleasures, to master the art of just being.”
― Brianna Wiest

“Many people say that you have to love yourself first before you can love others, but really, if you learn to love others, you will learn to love yourself.”
― Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

“The way you are self-sabotaging: Mindlessly scrolling through social media as a way to pass the time. What your subconscious mind might want you to know: This is one of the easiest ways to numb yourself, because it is so accessible and addictive. There is a world-altering difference between using social media in a healthy way versus as a coping mechanism. Mostly, it has to do with how you feel after you’re finished. If you don’t put the phone down feeling inspired or relaxed, you’re probably trying to avoid some kind of discomfort within yourself—the very discomfort that just might be telling you that you need to change.”
― Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

“Not everyone will like you. Not everyone will be kind to you. Not everyone will agree with you. That does not mean you have to be unkind in return.”
― Brianna Wiest

“Holding on will not make something come back. In my experience, it actually pushes it farther away. You cannot go back and undo what’s done, my friends. You can only move forward. And if your deepest compulsions and instincts tell you that you’re meant to be with that person or doing that thing, you should let go and move forth and see how life takes you there. Clearly, things aren’t going according to your desired plan already, so why not throw caution to the wind and see where you end up.”
― Brianna Wiest

“The real glow up isn’t proving the people from your past wrong. It is finally feeling so content and hopeful about your future that you stop thinking about them entirely.”
― Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

“Nobody cries at a funeral because the world will be missing out on another pretty face. They cry because the world is missing another heart, another soul, another person. Don’t wait until it’s too late to focus on what will actually matter: creating something that lasts far beyond your body.”
― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

“At the end of the day, all we really want are a few close people who know us (and love us) no matter what.”
― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

“You were taught that love is supposed to be patient and kind, and not something that challenges you and changes you and makes you who you are.”
― Brianna Wiest

“A friend once told me that the secret to finding love was not to actually look for it, but to heal the things that were preventing you from seeing and receiving it. I think the biggest one of all is, “What will having this love fix?”

What will having this person next to me make me feel better about? What do I need them to tell me? What do I need them to prove? Who do I need them to look great in front of? What purpose do they serve for my ego?”
― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

“Make a list of all the imperfect people you’ve known in your life who have had love. Who have had romantic partners and best friends and jobs you could only ever dream of. Make a list of all the people who are conventionally unattractive and spiritually adrift and imperfect and all the things each one of them had despite being that way. Make it your own personal proof that you do not need to be perfect to be good enough.”
― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

“Love is soul work. Love can be met and joined with attraction and infatuation and all of that, but love will not fade when those things do. You can choose to close your heart to love, and run away, and avoid it for as long as you can in every way you can think of but if it was really, truly, the other-worldly, almost supernatural kind of love that we can only hope to be graced with at least once in this life experience, it will not leave you. You can love many people, but at the end of the day, the love you need to choose is the love that, even if you close your heart to, still moves you. The love you still write about. The love you can’t face. The love you’re still not okay with losing, that you’re angry about; the love that uprooted your life and contorted your being. The love you ran away from because it showed you who you are without the guise of worth given from someone else. This is love because these are all signs that you are closing your heart and to be doing so, there has to be something going through you for you to be able to close off. Real love will be the love you realize that remains even after you close your heart to it, because it sustains itself. It drives you forward. It brings up all the unhealed parts of you that you have to reconcile.”
― Brianna Wiest

“Happiness is not something you can chase. It is something you have to allow. This likely will come as a surprise to many people, as the world is so adamant about everything from positive psychology to motivational Pinterest boards. But happiness is not something you can coach yourself into. Happiness is your natural state. That means you will return to it on your own if you allow the other feelings you want to experience to come up, be felt, be processed, and not resisted. The less you resist your unhappiness, the happier you will be. It is often just trying too hard to feel one certain way that sets us up for failure.”
― Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

“It’s not about getting over things, it’s about making room for them. It’s about painting the picture with contrast.”
― Brianna Wiest

“Your impermanence is a thing you should meditate on every day: There is nothing more sobering, nor scary, nor a faster-way-to-cut-the-negative-bullshit than to remember that you do not have forever. What defines your life, when it’s all said and done, is how much you influence other people’s lives, oftentimes just through your daily interactions and the courage with which you live your own. That’s what people remember. That’s what you will be known for when you’re no longer around to define yourself.”
― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

“The universe whispers until it screams, and happy people listen while the call is still quiet”
― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

“You think your past defines you, and worse, you think that it is an unchangeable reality, when really, your perception of it changes as you do.
Because experience is always multi-dimensional, there are a variety of memories, experiences, feelings, “gists” you can choose to recall…and what you choose is indicative of your present state of mind. So many people get caught up in allowing the past to define them or haunt them simply because they have not evolved to the place of seeing how the past did not prevent them from achieving the life they want, it facilitated it. This doesn’t mean to disregard or gloss over painful or traumatic events, but simply to be able to recall them with acceptance and to be able to place them in the storyline of your personal evolution.”
― Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

“Danger is real. Heartache is real. Fear is not. It’s a story we tell ourselves.”
― Brianna Wiest

“Today may be your last chance to be you, someone you forgot to completely immerse yourself in because you were too worried about the details. The details that, no matter how many times you thought them through, brought you no closer to understanding. They just tied up your mind and prevented you from really letting in the things you love. Your demon that is standing before the beautiful floodgate and is keeping you in a dehydrated nothingness.

Give him permission to walk away. He is not your keeper. You are his.”
― Brianna Wiest

“Happiness, if you think about it, is the biggest conundrum we face. The pursuit of it is why we do basically everything that we do, and yet, none of that effort is necessary: it’s the simplest choice of changing our state of mind.”
― Brianna Wiest