Top 100 Nathaniel Branden Quotes
#1. It is naive to think that self-assertiveness is easy. To live self-assertively
which means to live authentically
is an act of high courage. That is why so many people spend the better part of their lives in hiding
from others and also from themselves.
Nathaniel Branden
#2. Force, governmental coercion, is the instrument by which the ethics of altruism - the belief that the individual exists to serve others - is translated into political reality.
Nathaniel Branden
#3. When people are not accepting toward themselves they
are often obsessed with acceptance by others.
Nathaniel Branden
#4. The tragedy of too many people is that they cannot allow happiness just to be there; they cannot leave it alone. Their sense of who they are and of what their destiny is cannot accommodate happiness. So they are drive to find ways to sabotage it.
Nathaniel Branden
#5. To attain "success" without attaining positive self-esteem is to be condemned to feeling like an imposter anxiously awaiting exposure.
Nathaniel Branden
#7. All positive interactions with other human beings involve, to some degree, the experience of visibility
that is, the experience of being seen and understood.
Nathaniel Branden
#8. Even when our life is most difficult, it is important to remember that something within us is keeping us alive- the life force-that lift us, energizes us, pulls us back sometimes from the abyss of despair. True spirituality does not exist without love of life.
Nathaniel Branden
#9. Moved by a passion they do not understand for a goal they seldom reach, men and women are haunted by the vision of a distant possibility that refuses to be extinguished.
Nathaniel Branden
#10. Consciousness that is not translated into appropriate action is a betrayal of consciousness ... Living consciously is living responsibly toward reality. We do not necessarily have to like what we see but we recognize that wishes or fears or denials do not alter facts.
Nathaniel Branden
#11. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#12. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#13. What a great teacher, a great parent, a great psychotherapist and a great coach have in common is a deep belief in the potential of the person with whom they are concerned. They relate to the person from their vision of his or her worth and value.
Nathaniel Branden
#14. To preserve an unclouded capacity for the enjoyment of life is an unusual moral and psychological achievement. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the prerogative of mindlessness, but the exact opposite: It is the reward of self-esteem.
Nathaniel Branden
#15. Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself.
Nathaniel Branden
#16. A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade ... there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event.
Nathaniel Branden
#17. Sometimes the subconscious mind manifests a wisdom several steps or even years ahead of the conscious mind, and has its own way of leading us toward our destiny.
Nathaniel Branden
#18. I cannot organize my behaviour optimally if my goal is merely "to do my best." The assignment is too vague.
Nathaniel Branden
#19. To persevere with the will to understand in the face of obstacles is the heroism of consciousness.
Nathaniel Branden
#21. How do we nurture the soul? By revering our own life. By learning to love it all, not only the joys and the victories, but also the pain and the struggles.
Nathaniel Branden
#23. It is true that people are sometimes hit by adversities beyond their control. But those so affected are better helped when they are awakened to the resources they do possess than when they are told they don't have any.
Nathaniel Branden
#24. It is humiliating to realize that when you drive yourself underground, when you fake who you are, often you do so for people you do not even like or respect.
Nathaniel Branden
#25. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#26. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#27. Where we see self esteem, we see self acceptance. High self esteem individual tend to avoid falling into an adversarial relationship with themselves.
Nathaniel Branden
#28. Fear and pain should be treated as signals not to close our eyes but to open them wider.
Nathaniel Branden
#29. High self esteem people can surely be knocked down by an excess of troubles, but they are quickerto pick themselves up again.
Nathaniel Branden
#30. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#32. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#33. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#34. If I am unwilling to take responsibility for the attainment of my desires, they are not really desires - they are merely daydreams.
Nathaniel Branden
#36. When we doubt our minds, we tend to discount its products. If we fear intellectual self-assertiveness, perhaps associating it with loss of love, we mute our intelligence. We dread being visible; so we make ourselves invisible, then suffer because no one sees us.
Nathaniel Branden
#37. 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 signalled others that it is not necessary to treat them with respect.
Nathaniel Branden
#38. The first love affair you must consummate is the love affair with yourself. Only then are you ready for a romantic relationship.
Nathaniel Branden
#39. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#41. The feeling that "I am enough" does not mean that I have nothing to learn, nothing further to achieve, and nowhere to grow to. It means that I accept myself, that I am not on trial in my own eyes, that I value and respect myself. This is not an act of indulgence but of courage.
Nathaniel Branden
#42. To trust one's mind and to know that one is worthy of happiness is the essence of self-esteem.
Nathaniel Branden
#44. A well-developed sense of self is a necessary if not sufficient condition of your well-being. Its presence does not guarantee fulfillment, but its absence guarantees some measure of anxiety, frustration, or despair.
Nathaniel Branden
#45. When self-esteem is low, we are often manipulated by fear ... We live more to avoid pain than to experience joy.
Nathaniel Branden
#46. Take responsibility for finding it. It is only by grace of the second type
Nathaniel Branden
#47. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#48. When we bury our feelings, we also bury ourselves. It means we exist in a state of alienation. We rarely know it, but we are lonely for ourselves.
Nathaniel Branden
#49. Our motive is not to prove our self-worth, but to live up to our possibilities.
Nathaniel Branden
#51. If you feel inadequate to face challenges, unworthy of love or respect, untitled to happiness, and fear assertive thought, wants, or needs- if you lack basic self trust, self-respect, and self-confidence- your self-esteem deficiency will limit you, no matter what other assets you possess.
Nathaniel Branden
#52. We are parts of one universe, true enough. We stand within an almost infinite network of relationships. Yet each of us is a single point of consciousness, a unique event, a private, unrepeatable world. This is the essence of our aloneness.
Nathaniel Branden
#53. Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves.
Nathaniel Branden
#54. We tend to feel most comfortable, "most at home", with people whose self esteem level resembles our own.
Nathaniel Branden
#55. When your principles seem to be demanding suicide, clearly it's time to check your premises
Nathaniel Branden
#56. One of the most significant characteristics of healthy self esteem is that it is the state of one who is not at war either with himself or with others.
Nathaniel Branden
#57. Either you will make your life work, or your life will not work.
Nathaniel Branden
#58. It's not that achievements prove our worth but rather that the process of achieving is the means by which we develop our effectiveness, our competence at living.
Nathaniel Branden
#60. If you face life without confidence in your own powers, you succumb too easily to setbacks and adversity; you lack the will to persevere.
Nathaniel Branden
#61. The ultimate test of our integrity is not how we deal with those whom we agree but how we deal with those who we do not agree.
Nathaniel Branden
#62. The idea of Original Sin - of guilt where there is no possibility of innocence, no freedom of choice, no alternatives available - is anti-self-esteem by its very nature. The very notion of guilt without volition or responsibility is an assault on reason as well as on morality.
Nathaniel Branden
#63. Romantic love is a passionate spiritual-emotional-sexual attachment between a man and a woman that reflects a high regard for the value of each other's person.
Nathaniel Branden
#64. It is a curious paradox of human history that a doctrine that tells human beings to regard themselves as sacrificial animals has been accepted as a doctrine representing benevolence and love for mankind.
Nathaniel Branden
#65. The concept of romantic love as a widely accepted cultural value and as the ideal basis of marriage was a product of the nineteenth century.
Nathaniel Branden
#66. The desire for self-esteem without integrity is like the desire for wealth without effort-a longing for the unearned.
Nathaniel Branden
#68. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#69. You can no more have too much self-esteem than you can have too much health.
Nathaniel Branden
#70. Integrity is the integration of ideals, convictions, standards, beliefs-and behavior. When our behavior is congruent with our professed values, when ideals and practice match up, we have integrity.
Nathaniel Branden
#71. The first act of honoring the self is the assertion of consciousness: the choice to think, to be aware, to send the searchlight of consciousness outward toward the world and inward toward our own being. To default on this effort is to default on the self at the most basic level.
Nathaniel Branden
#72. If you are terrified of making mistakes, you will be reluctant to acknowledge them when you do make them-and therefore you will not correct them.
Nathaniel Branden
#73. When we have unconflicted self-esteem, joy is our motor, not fear. It is happiness that we wish to experience, not suffering that we wish to avoid. Our purpose is self-expression, not self-avoidance or self-justification. Our motive is not to "prove" our worth but to live our possibilities.
Nathaniel Branden
#74. For "I" to become "we" and yet remain "I," is one of the great challenges of marriage.
Nathaniel Branden
#75. Out of fear, out of the desire for approval, out of misguided notions of duty, people surrender themselves
their convictions and their aspirations
every day. There is nothing noble about it. It takes far more courage to fight for your values than to relinquish them.
Nathaniel Branden
#76. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#77. For the optimal realization of our possibilities, we need to trust ourselves and we need to admire ourselves, and the trust and admiration need to be grounded in reality, not generated out of fantasy and self-delusion.
Nathaniel Branden
#78. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#79. What is required for many of us, paradoxical though it may sound, is the courage to tolerate happiness without self-sabotage.
Nathaniel Branden
#80. Do you want to be like Goethe or any of those so-called geniuses who marry a nothing hausfrau?
Nathaniel Branden
#81. Of all the judgments you make in life, none is as important as the one you make about yourself. The difference between low self-esteem and high self-esteem is the difference between passivity and action, between failure and success.
Nathaniel Branden
#82. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#83. If we attach more importance to what other people believe than to what we know to be true - if we value belonging over being - we will not attain authenticity.
Nathaniel Branden
#84. Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.
Nathaniel Branden
#85. Your life is important. Whether you achieve what you want in life matters. Whether you are happy matters. Honor and fight for your highest potential. Self-realizatio n-the realization of the best within you-is the noblest goal of your existence.
Nathaniel Branden
#86. Most of us are taught from an early age to pay far more attention to signals coming from other people than from within. We are encouraged to ignore our own needs and wants and to concentrate on living up to others expectations.
Nathaniel Branden
#87. Capitalism, by its nature, entails a constant process of motion, growth and progress.
Nathaniel Branden
#88. If you choose not to live self-responsibly, you count on others to make up your default. No one abjures self-responsibility on a desert island.
Nathaniel Branden
#89. Productive achievement is a consequence and an expression of health and self-esteem, not its cause.
Nathaniel Branden
#90. There is an irrational, cultish tendency in many intellectual movements, and Objectivism, alas, is no exception. Ayn Rand's personal obsession with loyalty did little to discourage this trend ... Rand had often protested, 'Protect me from my followers!'
Nathaniel Branden
#91. If we do not believe in ourselves- neither in our efficacy nor in our goodness- the universe is a frightening place.
Nathaniel Branden
#92. Your life is important. Honor it. Fight for your highest possibilities.
Nathaniel Branden
#93. Whether in the workplace or in personal relationships, success belongs to those who are willing to take responsibility for attaining their desires-those who respond to life actively rather than passively.
Nathaniel Branden
#94. Set goals that don't feel all that easy, that challenge you, stimulate you, and give you a chance to stretch and push yourself. That is where the power of growth lies.
Nathaniel Branden
#95. You have a right to your feelings. Your feelings are there to tell you something, but they are not infallible guides to behavior.
Nathaniel Branden
#96. To honor the self is to be willing to think independently, to live by our own mind, and to have the courage of our own perceptions.
Nathaniel Branden
#97. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#98. Most of the time, I regard the judgment of people as a waste of time. I regard the judgment of behavior as imperative.
Nathaniel Branden
#99. Accepting does not necessarily mean liking, enjoying, condoning. I can accept what is-and be determined to evolve from there. It is not acceptance but denial that leaves me stuck.
Nathaniel Branden
#100. The music that inspires the souls of lovers exists within themselves and the private universe they occupy. They share it with each other; they do not share it with the tribe or with society. The courage to hear that music and to honor it is one of the prerequisites of romantic love.
Nathaniel Branden
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
