Nathaniel Branden
Productive achievement is a consequence and an expression of health and self-esteem, not its cause.Collection: Health
Tell me how a person judges his or her self-esteem, and I will tell you how that person operates at work, in love, in sex, in parenting, in every important aspect of existence - and how high he or she is likely to rise. The reputation you have with yourself - your self-esteem - is the single most important factor for a fulfilling life.Collection: Parenting
There is overwhelming evidence that the higher the level of self-esteem, the more likely one will be to treat others with respect, kindness, and generosity.Collection: Respect
Romantic love can be terrifying. We experience another human being as enormously important to us. So there is surrender - not a surrender to the other person so much as to our feeling for the other person. What is the obstacle? The possibility of loss.Collection: Romantic
The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.Collection: Change
Live with integrity, respect the rights of other people, and follow your own bliss.Collection: Respect
In a world in which the total of human knowledge is doubling about every ten years, our security can rest only on our ability to learn.Collection: Knowledge
Self esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.
Of all the nonsense written about love, none is more absurd than the notion that ideal love is selfless. To love is to see myself in you and to wish to celebrate myself with you. What I love is the embodiment of my values in another person. Love is an act of self-assertion, self-expression and a celebration of being alive.
A woman in love will do almost anything for a man, except give up the desire to improve him.
If we are happy within ourselves, we don't accept or demand that our partner should fulfill every need. We need to be comfortable with our own company.
Between the ages of 24 and 27, I read Freud's complete works, everything that had been translated into English. It was very stimulating intellectually. But I did not accept his view of neurosis or of human nature.
To love a person is to know and love the person. But we can pick up an enormous amount about another human being just by exchanging a couple of sentences. It's not yet knowledge; it's an intuition that motivates you to want to find out more.
Not a great deal is known about the factors in childhood that doubtless underlie a person's choice of career - I'm talking now about a career to which one is passionately committed, in contradistinction to a career chosen merely as a means of earning a living.
Self-esteem is a powerful force within each of us... Self-esteem is the experience that we are appropriate to life and to the requirements of life.
I cannot remember a time when the question of why people behave as they do was not intensely interesting to me. The desire to understand was very important. When I was young, I was aware of the fact that much of the time, the reasons a person gave for his actions were not the actual reasons.
When I was a child, I felt at times that I had been born into an insane asylum, that much of human life appeared to be an insane asylum. It was bewildering.
The United States was the first country in the history of the world to be consciously created out of an idea - and the idea was liberty.
Suffering is just about the easiest of all human activities; being happy is just about the hardest. And happiness requires, not surrender to guilt, but emancipation from guilt.Collection: Suffering
To attain "success" without attaining positive self-esteem is to be condemned to feeling like an imposter anxiously awaiting exposure.Collection: Self Esteem
One of the characteristics of love relationships that flower is a relatively high degree of mutual self-disclosure - a willingness to let our partner enter into the interior of our private world and a genuine interest in the private world of that partner. Couples in love tend to show more of themselves to each other than to any other person.Collection: Couple
Persons of high self-esteem are not driven to make themselves superior to others; they do not seek to prove their value by measuring themselves against a comparative standard. Their joy is being who they are, not in being better than someone else.Collection: Inspirational
How do we keep our inner fire alive? Two things, at minimum, are needed: an ability to appreciate the positives in our life – and a commitment to action. Every day, it's important to ask and answer these questions: ‘What's good in my life?’ and ‘What needs to be done?Collection: Leadership
To exist without purpose is to be at the mercy of the chance encounter, the chance invitation, the chance phone call, the chance event- always being controlled by forces external to oneself.Collection: Phones
If you overcome your fear to ask someone for a date, a raise, or help with a project, that is an act of self-assertiveness. You are moving out into life rather than contracting and withdrawing.Collection: Fear
If you are an adult, you are responsible for your life and well-being. No one owes you the fulfillment of your needs or wants; no one is here on earth to serve you. If you respect the principle of self-ownership, you understand that no one else owns you and that you do not own anyone else. Only on this understanding can there be peace on earth and good will among human beings.Collection: Self
The greatest barrier to achievement and success is not lack of talent or ability but rather the feeling that achievement and success, above a certain level, are outside our self-concept-our image of who we are and what is appropriate to us.Collection: Self
The stability we cannot find in the world, we must create within our own persons.Collection: World
Feel deeply to think clearly.Collection: Thinking
To trust one's mind and to know that one is worthy of happiness is the essence of self-esteem.Collection: Confidence
Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself.Collection: Depression
Some people stand and move as if they have no right to the space they occupy. They wonder why others often fail to treat them with respect-not realizing that they have signaled others that it is not necessary to treat them with respect.Collection: Respect
Every day, it's important to ask and answer these questions: "What's good in my life?" and "What needs to be done?"Collection: Life
Anyone who really loves you wants you to be authentic. And anyone who doesn't want you to be authentic doesn't really love you.Collection: Love You
A commitment to lifelong learning is a natural expression of the practice of living consciously.Collection: Commitment
Living consciously reflects the conviction that sight is preferable to blindness; that respecting the facts of reality is more satisfying than denying them; that evasion does not make the unreal real or the real unreal; that it is better to correct your mistakes that to pretend they do not exist; and that the more conscious you are of facts bearing on your life and goals, the more wisely and effectively you can act.Collection: Life
Fear and pain should be treated as signals not to close our eyes but to open them wider.Collection: Pain
Where we see self esteem, we see self acceptance. High self esteem individual tend to avoid falling into an adversarial relationship with themselves.Collection: Self Esteem
Your choices have psychological consequences. The way you choose to deal with reality, truth, facts - your choice to honor or dishonor your own perceptions - registers in your mind, for good or for bad, and either confirms and strengthens your self-esteem or undermines and weakens it.Collection: Self Esteem
Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.Collection: Atheist
Reason and emotion are not antagonists. What seems like a struggle between two opposing ideas or values, one of which, automatic and unconscious, manifests itself in the form of a feeling.Collection: Struggle
A productive purpose to which you give yourself fully and joyfully is one of the great adventures of life. It is a uniquely human source of happiness.Collection: Adventure
Respect starts with ourselves.Collection: Self Esteem
It is a mistake to look at someone who is self assertive and say, "It's easy for her, she has good self-esteem." One of the ways you build self-esteem is by being self-assertive when it is not easy to do so. There are always times when self-assertiven ess requires courage, no matter how high your self-esteem.Collection: Mistake
The world belongs to those who persevere.Collection: World
Capitalism, by its nature, entails a constant process of motion, growth and progress.Collection: Growth
If we do not believe in ourselves- neither in our efficacy nor in our goodness- the universe is a frightening place.Collection: Believe
In any culture, subculture, or family in which belief is valued above thought, and self-surrender is valued above self-expression, and conformity is valued above integrity, those who preserve their self-esteem are likely to be heroic exceptions.Collection: Integrity
When you are frightened, you typically pull energy in to your center, seeing less, hearing less-shrinking consciousness precisely when you need to expand it.Collection: Fear
One of the characteristics of love relationships that flower is a relatively high degree of mutual self-disclosureCollection: Flower