Nathaniel Branden Quotes

You have a right to your feelings. Your feelings are there to tell you something, but they are not infallible guides to behavior.

The idea of original sin
of guilt with no possibility of innocence, no freedom of choice, no alternatives
inherently militates against self-esteem. The very notion of guilt without volition or responsibility is an assault on reason as well as on morality. Sin is not original, it is originated
like virtue.

It would be hard to name a more certain sign of poor self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior.

Positive self-esteem operates as, in effect, the immune system of the consciousness, providing resistance, strength, and a capacity for regeneration. When self-esteem is low, our resilience in the face of life's adversities is diminished. We crumble before vicissitudes that a healthier sense of self could vanquish. We tend to be more influenced by the desire to avoid pain than to experience joy. Negatives have more power over us than positives.

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.

All positive interactions with other human beings involve, to some degree, the experience of visibility
that is, the experience of being seen and understood.

One of the hardest expressions of self-assertiveness is challenging your limiting beliefs.

It is not only negative feelings that become blocked. The repression extends to more and more of his emotional capacity.When one is given an anesthetic in preparation for surgery, it is not merely the capacity to experience pain that is suspended; the capacity to experience pleasure goes also - because what is blocked is the capacity to experience *feeling*. The same principle applies to the repression of emotions.
Chapter 1: Discovering the Unknown Self, pg. 9, Bantam Edition, 1984

Where we see self esteem, we see self acceptance. High self esteem individual tend to avoid falling into an adversarial relationship with themselves.

Of all the judgements we pass, none is as important as the one we pass on ourselves.

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.

One of the characteristics of love relationships that flower is a relatively high degree of mutual self-disclosure

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.

Some people have a view of self and of the universe that obliges them to struggle for happiness, to yearn for happiness-"some time in the future"-perhaps next year or the year after that. But not now. Not at this moment. Not here. Here and now is too terrifyingly close, too terrifyingly immediate. They suffer from happiness anxiety.

You can be loved by your family, your mate, and your friends yet not love yourself. You can be admired by your associates yet regard yourself as worthless. You can project an image of assurance and poise that fools almost everyone yet secretly tremble with a sense of inadequacy. You can fulfill the expectations of others yet fail your own. You can win every honor yet feel that you have accomplished nothing. What shall it profit a person to gain the esteem of the whole world yet lose his or her own?

When we are moved primarily by fear, sooner or later we precipitate the very calamity we dread. If we fear condemnation, we behave in ways that ultimately elicit disapproval. If we fear anger, eventually we make people angry.

Perhaps the essence of our evolution as human beings is to keep answering, on deeper and deeper levels, the basic question: Who am I?

The stability we cannot find in the world, we must create within our own persons.

Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves.

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.

Productive achievement is a consequence and an expression of health and self-esteem, not its cause.

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!'

What is guilt? It is moral self-reproach-I did wrong when it was possible to have done otherwise.

Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself.

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.

So far as we can ascertain, in primitive cultures the idea of romantic love did not exist at all.

If I am unwilling to take responsibility for the attainment of my desires, they are not really desires - they are merely daydreams.

Your life is important. Honor it. Fight for your highest possibilities.

Stressing the practice of living purposefully as essential to fully realized self-esteem is not equivalent to measuring an individual's worth by his or her external achievements. We admire achievements-in ourselves and others-and it is natural and appropriate for us to do so. But that is not the same thing as saying that our achievements are the measure or grounds of our self-esteem. The root of our self-esteem is not our achievements but those internally generated practices that, among other things, make it possible for us to achieve.

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.

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.

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.

Most of us are capable of more than we believe.

We must become what we wish to teach.

In the whole history of capitalism, no one has been able to establish a coercive monopoly by means of competition in a free market ... Every single coercive monopoly that exists or ever has existed ... was created and made possible only by an act of government ... which granted special privileges (not obtainable in a free market) to a man or a group of men, and forbade all others to enter that particular field.

Be careful what you say to your children. They may agree with you.

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.

Most of the time, I regard the judgment of people as a waste of time. I regard the judgment of behavior as imperative.

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.

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.

It is easy enough to say, Be true to your values. But what if your values are irrational? Or what if the virtues you have committed yourself to are so much against human nature that they cannot be practiced consistently? Be careful of what you accept as your code of morality. Think carefully about whether its tenets serve your life and well being. Exercise critical judgment. Realize how much is at stake-your life, your happiness, your self-esteem.

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.

One of the great self-deceptions
and one of the great foolishnesses
is to tell yourself, Only I will know. Only you will know that you are a liar; only you will know you deal unethically with people who trust you; only you will know you have no intention of honoring your promise. Whose knowledge or judgment do you imagine is more important? It is precisely your own ego from which there is no escape.

You can no more have too much self-esteem than you can have too much health.

The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.

It sounded, I told him, as if he had never learned to balance projecting goals into the future with appreciating and living in the present.
...
To the extent that our goal is to "prove" ourselves or ward off the fear of failure, this balance is difficult to achieve. We are too driven. Not joy but anxiety is our motor.
But if our aim is self-expression rather than self-justification, the balance tends to come more naturally. We will still need to think about its daily implementation, but the anxiety of wounded self-esteem will not make the task nearly impossible.

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.

The more you surrender to the fear of someone's disapproval, the more you lose face in your own eyes, and the more desperate you become for someone's approval. Within you is a void that should have been filled by self-esteem. When you attempt to fill it with the approval of others instead, the void grows deeper and the hunger for acceptance and approval grows stronger. The only solution is to summon the courage to honor your own judgment, frightening though that may be in the beginning.

Fear and pain should be treated as signals not to close our eyes but to open them wider.

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.

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.

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.

I am responsible for my own existence and happiness.

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.

Your life is important. Fight for it. Honour your highest potentials.

Either you will make your life work, or your life will not work.

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.

I have to respect other's opinions even if I don't agree with them.

A goal without an action plan is a daydream.

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.

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.

The lies most devastating to our self-esteem are not so much the lies we tell as the lies we live.

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.

The desire for self-esteem without integrity is like the desire for wealth without effort-a longing for the unearned.

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.

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.

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.

A bully hides his fears with fake bravado. That is the opposite of self-assertiveness.

One of the most important forms of heroism is the heroism of conciousness, the heroism of thought: the willingness to tolerate aloneness.

In a world in which we are exposed to more information, more options, more philosophies, more perspectives than ever before, in which we must choose the values by which we will live (rather than unquestioningly follow some tradition for no better reason than that our own parents did), we need to be willing to stand on our own judgment and trust our own intelligence-to look at the world through our own eyes-to chart our course and think through how to achieve the future we want, to commit ourselves to continuous questioning and learning-to be, in a word, self-responsible.

The natural inclination of a child is to take pleasure in the use of the mind no less than of the body. The child's primary business is learning. It is also the primary entertainment. To retain that orientation into adulthood, so that consciousness is not a burden but a joy, is the mark of the successfully developed human being.

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.

Whether your focus is on preserving and strengthening family ties in a world of increasingly unstable relationships, gaining access to a decent job, growing and evolving as a person, or guiding a company through the stormy seas of a fiercely competitive global marketplace-whether your goals are material, emotional, or spiritual-the price of success is the same: thinking, learning. To be asleep at the wheel-to rely only on the known, familiar, and automatized-is to invite disaster.

Sometimes the path to higher self-esteem is lonely and frightening. We cannot fully know in advance how much more satisfying our lives will be. But the more we are willing to experience and accept the many aspects of who we are, the richer our inner worlds, the greater our resources, the more appropriate we feel to the challenges and opportunities of life. Also, it is more likely that we will find - or create - a style of existence that will meet our individual needs.

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

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.

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.

I cannot organize my behaviour optimally if my goal is merely "to do my best." The assignment is too vague.

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.

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.

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.

You are not likely to bring out the best in people or nurture their creativity if every time you hear about their problems you instantly offer a solution Encourage people to look for their own solutions-and project the knowledge that they are capable of doing so.

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.

Most people do not erode their self-esteem over big issues but over small ones, little acts of betrayal and hypocrisy forgotten (repressed) very quickly. But the computer in your subconscious mind forgets nothing. It records your spiritual profit and loss. The balance sheet reflects your present level of self-esteem
and sends you the information via your emotions.

Integrity is congruence between what you know, what you profess, and what you do.

While self-esteem touches virtually every aspect of our existence, there are two aspects to which it is related in very distinct and powerful ways: work and love. Through work and through love, we act out the level of our confidence and our sense of personal worth. The drama of our life is the external reflection of our internal vision of ourselves. The higher the level of our self-esteem, the more likely it is that we will find a work and a love through which we can express ourselves in satisfying and enriching ways.

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.

When your principles seem to be demanding suicide, clearly it's time to check your premises

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.

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.

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.

Respect starts with ourselves.

Live with integrity, respect the rights of other people, and follow your own bliss.

I recall my sometimes acutely painful feelings of loneliness and of longing for someone with whom I could share thoughts, interests, and feelings. By sixteen I had accepted the idea that loneliness was a weakness and longing for human intimacy represented a failure of independence. I did not hold this view consistently, but I held it some of the time, and when I did, I had no answer to the pain except to tense my body against it, contract my breathing, reproach myself, and look for a distraction. I tried to convince myself I did not care. In effect, I clung to alienation as a virtue.

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.

Everyone who has any familiarity with psychology knows about the danger of disowning the murderer within. Far fewer people understand the tragedy of disowning the hero within.

Self-esteem is not a luxury; it is a profound spiritual need.

If you do not feel deserving of happiness, consciously or subconsciously, or if you have accepted the idea that happiness is somehow wrong or cannot last, you will not respond appropriately when happiness comes knocking at your door in the form of romantic love. No matter how much you may have waited and cried, you will not welcome love when it arrives-you will find a way to sabotage it. What a challenge to resist this temptation! What an opportunity for true spiritual growth and transformation-to defy your negative feelings and honor the gift that life offers you!

The real basic power of an individual isn't what he or she knows; it's the ability to think and learn and face new challenges.

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.