Top 180 Nathaniel Branden Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I am responsible for my own existence and happiness.”

— Nathaniel Branden

52. “I can be loved by my family, my mate, and my friends, and yet not love myself. I can be admired by my associates and yet regard myself as worthless.”

— Nathaniel Branden

53. “How do we nurture the soul? By revering our own life. By learning to love it all, not only the joys and the victories, but also the pain and the struggles.”

— Nathaniel Branden

54. “The tragedy of too many people is that they cannot allow happiness just to be there; they cannot leave it alone. Their sense of who they are and of what their destiny is cannot accommodate happiness. So they are drive to find ways to sabotage it.”

— Nathaniel Branden

55. “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.”

— Nathaniel Branden

56. “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

57. “We tend to feel most comfortable, “most at home”, with people whose self esteem level resembles our own.”

— Nathaniel Branden

58. “Set goals that don’t feel all that easy, that challenge you, stimulate you, and give you a chance to stretch and push yourself. That is where the power of growth lies.”

— Nathaniel Branden

59. “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.”

— Nathaniel Branden

60. “Do not marry the enemy of your excitement.”

— Nathaniel Branden

61. “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.”

— Nathaniel Branden

62. “The higher our self-esteem, the more likely we are to be creative in our work, which means the more successful we are likely to be. The higher our self-esteem, the more ambitious we tend to be, not necessarily in a career or financial sense, but in terms of what we hope to experience in life – emotionally, creatively and spiritually.”

— Nathaniel Branden

63. “The first love affair you must consummate is the love affair with yourself. Only then are you ready for a romantic relationship.”

— Nathaniel Branden

64. “Your life is important. Whether you achieve what you want in life matters. Whether you are happy matters. Honor and fight for your highest potential. Self-realizatio n-the realization of the best within you-is the noblest goal of your existence.”

— Nathaniel Branden

65. “When we bury our feelings, we also bury ourselves. It means we exist in a state of alienation. We rarely know it, but we are lonely for ourselves.”

— Nathaniel Branden

66. “When we have unconflicted self-esteem, joy is our motor, not fear. It is happiness that we wish to experience, not suffering that we wish to avoid. Our purpose is self-expression, not self-avoidance or self-justification. Our motive is not to “prove” our worth but to live our possibilities.”

— Nathaniel Branden

67. “Your life is important. Honor it. Fight for your highest possibilities.”

— Nathaniel Branden

68. “The opposite of self-assertiveness is self-abnegation – abandoning or submerging your personal values, judgment, and interests. Some people tell themselves this is a virtue. It is a “virtue” that corrodes self-esteem.”

— Nathaniel Branden

69. “I accept the reality of my problems, but I am not defined by them. My problems are not my essence. My fear, pain, confusion, or mistakes are not my core.”

— Nathaniel Branden

70. “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.”

— Nathaniel Branden

71. “Most of us are taught from an early age to pay far more attention to signals coming from other people than from within. We are encouraged to ignore our own needs and wants and to concentrate on living up to others expectations.”

— Nathaniel Branden

72. “One of the most significant characteristics of healthy self esteem is that it is the state of one who is not at war either with himself or with others.”

— Nathaniel Branden

73. “I choose to value myself, to treat myself with respect, to stand up for my right to exist.”

— Nathaniel Branden

74. “Romantic love can be terrifying. We experience another human being as enormously important to us. So there is surrender -not a surrender to the other person so much as to our feeling for the other person. What is the obstacle? The possibility of loss.”

— Nathaniel Branden

75. “Either you will make your life work, or your life will not work.”

— Nathaniel Branden

76. “If you bring five percent more awareness to your work tomorrow, or to your most important relationship, what might you do differently? Are you willing to find out?”

— Nathaniel Branden

77. “It is humiliating to realize that when you drive yourself underground, when you fake who you are, often you do so for people you do not even like or respect.”

— Nathaniel Branden

78. “Whether in the workplace or in personal relationships, success belongs to those who are willing to take responsibility for attaining their desires-those who respond to life actively rather than passively.”

— Nathaniel Branden

79. “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.”

— Nathaniel Branden

80. “If you have high self-esteem, you might still know times of emotional suffering, but less often and with faster recovery-your resilience is greater.”

— Nathaniel Branden

81. “The willingness to experience and accept our feelings carries no implication that emotions are to have the last word on what we do. I may not be in the mood to work today; I can acknowledge my feelings, experience them, accept them – and then go to work. I will work with a clearer mind because I have not begun the day with self-deception.”

— Nathaniel Branden

82. “The highest compliment one can be paid by another human being is to be told: ‘Because of what you are, you are essential to my happiness.’”

— Nathaniel Branden

83. “Genuine self-esteem is what we feel about ourselves when everything is not all right.”

— Nathaniel Branden

84. “The first act of honoring the self is the assertion of consciousness: the choice to think, to be aware, to send the searchlight of consciousness outward toward the world and inward toward our own being. To default on this effort is to default on the self at the most basic level.”

— Nathaniel Branden

85. “A woman in love will do almost anything for a man, except give up the desire to improve him.”

— Nathaniel Branden

86. “To love is to see myself in you and to wish to celebrate myself with you. What I love is the embodiment of my values in another person. Love is an act of self-assertion, self-expression and a celebration of being alive.”

— Nathaniel Branden

87. “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.”

— Nathaniel Branden

88. “If you overcome your fear to ask someone for a date, a raise, or help with a project, that is an act of self-assertiveness. You are moving out into life rather than contracting and withdrawing.”

— Nathaniel Branden

89. “Fully to surrender to love can be terrifying. But it is the price life asks in exchange for the possibility of ecstasy.”

— Nathaniel Branden

90. “I have to respect other’s opinions even if I don’t agree with them.”

— Nathaniel Branden

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

— Nathaniel Branden

92. “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.”

— Nathaniel Branden

93. “Never marry a person who is not a friend of your excitement.”

— Nathaniel Branden

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

— Nathaniel Branden

95. “Self-discipline is the ability to organize your behavior over time in the service of specific goals.”

— Nathaniel Branden

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

— Nathaniel Branden

97. “Living consciously implies that my first loyalty is to truth, not to making myself right.”

— Nathaniel Branden

98. “Our liabilities pose the problem of inadequacy; our our assets, the challenge of responsibility. Our strengths or virtues can make us feel alone, alienated, cut off from the common herd, a target for envy and hostility, and our desire to belong can overcome any desire to actualise our highest potential.”

— Nathaniel Branden

99. “To persevere with the will to understand in the face of obstacles is the heroism of consciousness.”

— Nathaniel Branden

100. “It is a curious paradox of human history that a doctrine that tells human beings to regard themselves as sacrificial animals has been accepted as a doctrine representing benevolence and love for mankind.”

— Nathaniel Branden