Quotes from Nathaniel Branden

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

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

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.

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.

The greater a child's terror, and the earlier it is experienced, the harder it becomes to develop a strong and healthy sense of self.

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?

Self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.

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.

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.

Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. When man rejects reason as his standard of judgement, only one alternative standard remains to him: his feelings. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feelings with knowledge

We must become what we wish to teach.

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.

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

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.

Self-discipline is the ability to organize your behavior over time in the service of specific goals.

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

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.

Regardless of what we think we're teaching, we teach what we are.

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.

It is painful to face the self we know we have never had the integrity to honor and assert.

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

Never marry a person who is not a friend of your excitement.

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.

What is required for many of us, paradoxical though it may sound, is the courage to tolerate happiness without self-sabotage.