Top 100 Nathaniel Branden Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Take responsibility for finding it. It is only by grace of the second type
Nathaniel Branden
#4. When self-esteem is low, we are often manipulated by fear ... We live more to avoid pain than to experience joy.
Nathaniel Branden
#5. When we learn how to be in an intimate relationship without abandoning our sense of self, when we learn how to be kind without being self-sacrificing, when we learn how to cooperate with others without betraying our standards and convictions, we are practicing self-assertiveness.
Nathaniel Branden
#6. The lies most devastating to our self-esteem are not so much the lies we tell as the lies we live.
Nathaniel Branden
#7. 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
#10. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#11. To trust one's mind and to know that one is worthy of happiness is the essence of self-esteem.
Nathaniel Branden
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. The first love affair you must consummate is the love affair with yourself. Only then are you ready for a romantic relationship.
Nathaniel Branden
#16. 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
#17. The thing I want you to understand," Ayn was saying, "is that no matter how hard the battle, it can be won. You can break through.
Nathaniel Branden
#18. 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
#19. One of the most important forms of heroism is the heroism of conciousness, the heroism of thought: the willingness to tolerate aloneness.
Nathaniel Branden
#21. The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.
Nathaniel Branden
#22. What is guilt? It is moral self-reproach-I did wrong when it was possible to have done otherwise.
Nathaniel Branden
#23. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#24. If I am unwilling to take responsibility for the attainment of my desires, they are not really desires - they are merely daydreams.
Nathaniel Branden
#25. If my aim is to prove I am "enough," the project goes on to infinity - because the battle was already lost on the day I conceded the issue was debatable.
Nathaniel Branden
#26. As a psychotherapist I see that nothing does as much for an individual's self-esteem as becoming aware of and accepting disowned parts of the self. The, first steps of healing and growth are awareness and acceptance - consciousness and integration. They are the fountainhead of personal development.
Nathaniel Branden
#27. 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
#28. Either you will make your life work, or your life will not work.
Nathaniel Branden
#29. There is only one reality - the reality knowable to reason. And if man does not choose to perceive it, there is nothing else for him to perceive; if it is not of this world that he is conscious, then he is not conscious at all
Nathaniel Branden
#30. 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
#31. The challenge for people today
and it is not and easy one
is to maintain high personal standards even while feeling that one is living in a moral sewer.
Nathaniel Branden
#32. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#33. The policy of seeking values from human beings by means of force, when practiced by an individual, is called crime. When practiced by a government, it is called statism ...
Nathaniel Branden
#34. When your principles seem to be demanding suicide, clearly it's time to check your premises
Nathaniel Branden
#36. It would be hard to name a more certain sign of poor self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior.
Nathaniel Branden
#37. Suppose you feel you cannot accept some fact about yourself. Then own your refusal to accept. Own the block. Embrace it fully. And watch it begin to disappear. The principal is this: Begin where you are-accept that. Then change and growth become possible.
Nathaniel Branden
#38. A woman in love will do almost anything for a man, except give up the desire to improve him.
Nathaniel Branden
#39. 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
#40. It is very difficult to accept in others emotions you cannot accept in yourself.
Nathaniel Branden
#41. We tend to feel most comfortable, "most at home", with people whose self esteem level resembles our own.
Nathaniel Branden
#42. Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves.
Nathaniel Branden
#43. 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
#44. 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
#47. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#50. Our motive is not to prove our self-worth, but to live up to our possibilities.
Nathaniel Branden
#51. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#52. Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself.
Nathaniel Branden
#54. Perhaps the essence of our evolution as human beings is to keep answering, on deeper and deeper levels, the basic question: Who am I?
Nathaniel Branden
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. I have to respect other's opinions even if I don't agree with them.
Nathaniel Branden
#62. 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
#64. 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
#65. Your life is important. Fight for it. Honour your highest potentials.
Nathaniel Branden
#66. 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
#67. 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
#69. To attain "success" without attaining positive self-esteem is to be condemned to feeling like an imposter anxiously awaiting exposure.
Nathaniel Branden
#70. The opposite of self-assertiveness is self-abnegation
abandoning or submerging your personal values, judgment, and interests. Some people tell themselves this is a virtue. It is a "virtue" that corrodes self-esteem.
Nathaniel Branden
#71. Self-discipline is the ability to organize your behavior over time in the service of specific goals.
Nathaniel Branden
#72. 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
#73. When people are not accepting toward themselves they
are often obsessed with acceptance by others.
Nathaniel Branden
#74. There is no value-judgment more important to a man
no factor more decisive in his psychological development and motivation
than the estimate he passes on himself.
Nathaniel Branden
#75. 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
#77. 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
#79. 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
#80. As you grow in self-esteem, your face, manner, way of talking and moving will tend naturally to project the pleasure you take in being alive.
Nathaniel Branden
#81. High self esteem people can surely be knocked down by an excess of troubles, but they are quickerto pick themselves up again.
Nathaniel Branden
#82. To live consciously means to seek to be aware of everything that bears on our actions, purposes, values, and goals - to the best of our ability, whatever that ability may be - and to behave in accordance with that which we see and know.
Nathaniel Branden
#83. Fear and pain should be treated as signals not to close our eyes but to open them wider.
Nathaniel Branden
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Sometimes self-assertiveness is manifested through volunteering an idea or paying a compliment; sometimes through a polite silence that signals nonagreement; sometimes by refusing to smile at a tasteless joke.
Nathaniel Branden
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. For the rational, psychologically healthy man, the desire for pleasure is the desire to celebrate his control over reality. For the neurotic, the desire for pleasure is the desire to escape from reality.
Nathaniel Branden
#91. 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
#92. Integrity is congruence between what you know, what you profess, and what you do.
Nathaniel Branden
#93. 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.
Nathaniel Branden
#95. 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
#97. To persevere with the will to understand in the face of obstacles is the heroism of consciousness.
Nathaniel Branden
#98. I cannot organize my behaviour optimally if my goal is merely "to do my best." The assignment is too vague.
Nathaniel Branden
#100. 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
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