Self esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.

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.

A well-developed sense of self is a necessary if not sufficient condition of your well-being. Its presence does not guarantee fulfillment, but its absence guarantees some measure of anxiety, frustration, or despair.

The stability we cannot find in the world, we must create within our own persons.

Reason and emotion are not antagonists. What seems like a struggle between two opposing ideas or values, one of which, automatic and unconscious, manifests itself in the form of a feeling.

An emotion is both a mental and a physical event.

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