Nathaniel Branden

Don’t be miserly with your strengths, with your intelligence, and with your creativity. Look for outlets. Look for challenges. Find out what makes you feel most alive and figure out some way to earn your living doing it.

When we are frightened, we typically pull energy *in* to our center, seeing less, hearing less—shrinking consciousness precisely when we need to *expand* it.

We undermine our self-esteem when we persist in our contradictions, because at a deeper level we know what we are doing.

The most momentous leaps of growth commonly have as their springboard fairly modest first steps.

Like a light that can be turned brighter or dimmer, consciousness exists on a continuum.

In aligning ourselves with reality as best we understand it, we optimize our chances for success.

Doing more of what doesn’t work doesn’t work.

Mindfulness is an orientation, a discipline, a spiritual commitment. It is the direction in which we aim, the path to which we pledge our lives.

Only a policy of continuous learning, applied over a lifetime, can allow one to remain economically adaptive.

Whoever continually strives to achieve a clearer and clearer vision of reality and our place in it—whoever is pulled forward by a passion for such clarity—is, to that extent, leading a spiritual life.

Self-concept is destiny.

Self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.

Often what we call ‘thinking’ is merely the recycling the opinions of others.

To trust one’s mind and to know that one is worthy of happiness is the essence of self-esteem.

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 challenge for people today, and it is not an easy one, is to maintain high personal standards while feeling that one is living in a moral sewer.

Integrity means congruence. Words and behavior match.

At the simplest level, personal integrity entails such questions as: Am I honest, reliable, and trustworthy? Do I keep my promises? Do I do the things I say I admire and do I avoid the things I say I deplore? Am I fair and just in my dealings with others?

A commitment to lifelong learning is a natural expression of the practice of living consciously.

I cannot be truly myself, cannot build self-esteem, if I cannot accept myself.

But does anything take more courage—is anything more challenging and sometimes frightening--than to live by our own mind, judgment, and values? Is not self-esteem a summons to the hero within us?

To find it humiliating to admit an error is a certain sign of a flawed self-esteem.