Michelle Davidson > Michelle's Quotes

“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”
― Iyanla Vanzant, Yesterday, I Cried

“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.”
― Iyanla Vanzant

“Your willingness to look at your darkness is what empowers you to change.”
― Iyanla Vanzant

“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.”
― Iyanla Vanzant

“You have set standards for how you want to be treated and what you expect from yourself and for yourself.”
― Iyanla Vanzant, In the Meantime: Finding Yourself and the Love You Want

“One way to eliminate self negating thoughts and behavior is by gaining more understanding through realizing that you cannot force others to see that what you feel is real.”
― Iyanla Vanzant

“When you stand and share your story in an empowering way, your story will heal you and your story will heal somebody else.”
― Iyanla Vanzant

“The voice I had accepted as Divine Guidance was actually the voice of my ego leading me right into destruction.”
― Iyanla Vanzant, Peace from Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You're Going Through

“Before you find out who you are, you have to figure out who you aren't..”
― Iyanla Vanzant

“When you can look a thing dead in the eye, acknowledge that it exists, call it exactly what it is, and decide what role it will take in your life then, my Beloved, you have taken the first step toward your freedom.”
― Iyanla Vanzant

“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.”
― Iyanla Vanzant

“What is it that would make a creature as fierce, majestic and powerful as a lion is, subject itself to the intimidation of a man a whip and a chair? The lion has been taught to forget what it is.”
― Iyanla Vanzant, Peace from Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You're Going Through

“Their issues are not your issues.”
― Iyanla Vanzant, The Value in the Valley: A Black Woman's Guide Through Life's Dilemmas