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If we attach more importance to what other people believe than to what we know to be true - if we value belonging over being - we will not attain authenticity.

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
Value
Values
True
Attach
Believe
Authenticity
People
Belonging
Attain
Importance

More quotes by Nathaniel Branden

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The reputation you have with yourself - your self-esteem - is the single most important factor for a fulfilling life.
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Integrity is the integration of ideals, convictions, standards, beliefs-and behavior. When our behavior is congruent with our professed values, when ideals and practice match up, we have integrity.
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Either you will make your life work, or your life will not work.
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Anyone who really loves you wants you to be authentic. And anyone who doesn't want you to be authentic doesn't really love you.
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Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself.
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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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A woman in love will do almost anything for a man, except give up the desire to improve him.
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Accepting does not necessarily mean liking, enjoying, condoning. I can accept what is-and be determined to evolve from there. It is not acceptance but denial that leaves me stuck.
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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.
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Loving consciously does not mean subjecting your relationship to endless analysis. It means something much simpler: paying attention. Noticing. This requires presence.
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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.
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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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Feel deeply to think clearly.
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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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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.
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For the rational, psychologically healthy man, the desire for pleasure is the desire to celebrate his control over reality. For the neurotic, the desire for pleasure is the desire to escape from reality.
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Integrity is congruence between what you know, what you profess, and what you do.
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Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves.
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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.
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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.
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