Fully to surrender to love can be terrifying. But it is the price life asks in exchange for the possibility of ecstasy.
The lies most devastating to our self-esteem are not so much the lies we tell as the lies we live.
The world belongs to those who persevere.
A woman in love will do almost anything for a man, except give up the desire to improve him.
Respect starts with ourselves.
Never marry a person who is not a friend of your excitement.
When we learn how to be in an intimate relationship without abandoning our sense of self, when we learn how to be kind without being self-sacrificing, when we learn how to cooperate with others without betraying our standards and convictions, we are practicing self-assertiveness.
Regardless of what we think we’re teaching, we teach what we are.
One of the great self-deceptions – and one of the great foolishnesses – is to tell yourself, Only I will know. Only you will know that you are a liar; only you will know you deal unethically with people who trust you; only you will know you have no intention of honoring your promise. Whose knowledge or judgment do you imagine is more important? It is precisely your own ego from which there is no escape.
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.
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.
What is required for many of us, paradoxical though it may sound, is the courage to tolerate happiness without self-sabotage.
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.
All positive interactions with other human beings involve, to some degree, the experience of visibility – that is, the experience of being seen and understood.
We are parts of one universe, true enough. We stand within an almost infinite network of relationships. Yet each of us is a single point of consciousness, a unique event, a private, unrepeatable world. This is the essence of our aloneness.
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.
In the inner courtroom of my mind, mine is the only judgment that counts.
To be flexible is to be able to respond to change without inappropriate attachments binding one to the past. A clinging to the past in the face of new and changing circumstances is itself a product of insecurity, a lack of self-trust. Rigidity is what animals sometimes manifest when they are frightened: they freeze.
A mind that trusts itself is light on its feet.
Most of us are capable of more than we believe.