Quote

Our motive is not to prove our self-worth, but to live up to our possibilities.

Nathaniel Branden

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Nathaniel Branden
Age: 84 †
Born: 1930
Born: April 9
Died: 2014
Died: December 3
Academic
Non-Fiction Writer
Psychologist
Psychotherapist
Esteem
Prove
Possibility
Worth
Live
Self
Possibilities
Motive

More quotes by Nathaniel Branden

Image
A goal without an action plan is a daydream.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
... there is an irrational, cultish tendency in many intellectual movements, and Objectivism, alas, is no exception. Ayn Rand's personal obsession with loyalty did little to discourage this trend.... Rand had often protested, 'Protect me from my followers!'
Nathaniel Branden
Image
Where we see self esteem, we see self acceptance. High self esteem individual tend to avoid falling into an adversarial relationship with themselves.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
To exist without purpose is to be at the mercy of the chance encounter, the chance invitation, the chance phone call, the chance event- always being controlled by forces external to oneself.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
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.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
Freedom is still the most radical idea of all.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
No one is coming to save you.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
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
Image
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.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
Capitalism, by its nature, entails a constant process of motion, growth and progress.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
A bully hides his fears with fake bravado. That is the opposite of self-assertiveness.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
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.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
The stability we cannot find in the world, we must create within our own persons.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
Even when our life is most difficult, it is important to remember that something within us is keeping us alive- the life force-that lift us, energizes us, pulls us back sometimes from the abyss of despair. True spirituality does not exist without love of life.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
There is only one reality - the reality knowable to reason. And if man does not choose to perceive it, there is nothing else for him to perceive if it is not of this world that he is conscious, then he is not conscious at all
Nathaniel Branden
Image
We tend to feel most comfortable, most at home, with people whose self esteem level resembles our own.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade...there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
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.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself.
Nathaniel Branden
Image
The policy of seeking values from human beings by means of force, when practiced by an individual, is called crime. When practiced by a government, it is called statism.
Nathaniel Branden