Quotes from Nathaniel Branden

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

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.

Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy confronts every day the devastation wrought by the teachings of religion.

My life does not belong to others and I am not here on earth to live up to someone else's expectations.

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

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.

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.

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.

Chances are, when you were young, you were told, in effect, Listen, kid, here is the news: life is not about you. Life is not about what you want. What you want is not important. Life is about doing what others expect of you. If you accepted this idea, later on you wondered what had happened to your fire. Where had your enthusiasm for living gone?

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.

To be flexible is to be able to respond to change without inappropriate attachments binding one to the past. A clinging to the past in the face of new and changing circumstances is itself a product of insecurity, a lack of self-trust. Rigidity is what animals sometimes manifest when they are frightened: they freeze.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Ideas do matter and do have consequences.

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

Most of us are capable of more than we believe.

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.