Quotes from Nathaniel Branden

Coopersmith discovered no significant correlations with such factors as family wealth, education, geographic living area, social class, Father's occupation, or always having Mother at home. What he did find to be significant was the quality of the relationship between the child and the important adults in his or her life.

The demand today is for people with knowledge.

Today one needs an education. One needs formal training. Or else one needs to be extraordinarily gifted at self-education. And one needs to understand that the process can never stop, because new knowledge begins to make one's training obsolete almost as soon as one completes it.

what we see is no longer "management" and "workers" but an integration of specialists. Each of these specialists has knowledge and expertise not possessed by the others in the organization.

High-self-esteem people can surely be knocked down by an excess of troubles, but they are quicker to pick themselves up again.

Again, living purposefully entails living consciously.

Self-assertiveness" without consciousness is not self-assertiveness; it is drunk-driving.

This entails the choice to see, to think, to be aware, to send the light of consciousness outward toward the world and inward toward our own being.

The better I know and understand myself, the better the life I can create. Self-examination is an imperative of a fulfilled existence.

Freedom means change; the ability to manage change is at least in part a function of self-esteem.

Not fear of this responsibility but surrender to the fear is a chief contributor to the subversion of self-esteem.

Just as a healthy immune system does not guarantee that one will never become ill, but makes one less vulnerable to disease and better equipped to overcome it, so a healthy self-esteem does not guarantee that one will never suffer anxiety or depression in the face of life's difficulties, but makes one less susceptible and better equipped to cope, rebound, and transcend.

For many people, self-surrender and self-sacrifice are far easier. They do not require the integrity and responsibility that intelligent selfishness requires.

When we expand the boundaries of our ability to cope, we expand self-efficacy and self-respect.

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 in being who they are, not in being better than someone else.

Self-concept is destiny. Or, more precisely, it tends to be.

Where there is no power, there can be no responsibility, and where there is no responsibility, there can be no reasonable self-reproach. Regret, yes; guilt, no.

If one partner in a marriage whose self-esteem is deteriorating sees that the partner's self-esteem is growing, the response is sometimes anxiety and an attempt to sabotage the growth process.

I have found increasingly more extensive and illuminating ways to use it to facilitate self-understanding, melt repressive barriers, liberate self-expression, activate self-healing—and continually test and retest my own hypotheses.

It expresses itself in an ease in talking of accomplishments or short-comings with directness and honesty, since one is in friendly relationship to facts.

We are the one species that can formulate a vision of what values are worth pursuing—and then pursue the opposite.

I can fulfill the expectations of others and yet fail my own; I can win every honor and yet feel I have accomplished nothing;

In the ultimate sense, I accept my aloneness. That is, I accept that no one is coming to make my life right, or save me, or redeem my childhood, or rescue me from the consequences of my choices and actions.

The higher our self-esteem, the stronger the drive to express ourselves, reflecting the sense of richness within.