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If you choose not to live self-responsibly, you count on others to make up your default. No one abjures self-responsibility on a desert island.

Nathaniel Branden

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Nathaniel Branden
Age: 84 †
Born: 1930
Born: April 9
Died: 2014
Died: December 3
Academic
Non-Fiction Writer
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Make
Islands
Count
Desert
Choose
Responsibility
Others
Responsibly
Live
Default
Self
Island

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A goal without an action plan is a daydream.
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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.
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If you face life without confidence in your own powers, you succumb too easily to setbacks and adversity you lack the will to persevere.
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Where we see self esteem, we see self acceptance. High self esteem individual tend to avoid falling into an adversarial relationship with themselves.
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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.
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A commitment to lifelong learning is a natural expression of the practice of living consciously.
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If we do have realistic confidence in our mind and value, if we feel secure within ourselves, we tend to experience the world as open to us and to respond appropriately to challenges and opportunities.
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The first love affair you must consummate is the love affair with yourself. Only then are you ready for a romantic relationship.
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For I to become we and yet remain I, is one of the great challenges of marriage.
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Self-esteem is not a luxury it is a profound spiritual need.
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As you grow in self-esteem, your face, manner, way of talking and moving will tend naturally to project the pleasure you take in being alive.
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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.
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It would be hard to name a more certain sign of poor self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior.
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Taking on responsibilities that properly belong to someone else means behaving irresponsibly toward yourself. You need to know where you end and someone else begins. You need to understand boundaries. You need to know what is and is not up to you, what is and is not in your control, what is and is not your responsibility.
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For children mastery entails struggle. This means they must be permitted to struggle. If parents inappropriately step in to help-out of impatience or solicitude-they sabotage important learning. Among other things, the child is unlikely to discover the advantages of perseverance and self-discipline.
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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.
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A productive purpose to which you give yourself fully and joyfully is one of the great adventures of life. It is a uniquely human source of happiness.
Nathaniel Branden
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Either you will make your life work, or your life will not work.
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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.
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Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself.
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