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.

The more you surrender to the fear of someone's disapproval, the more you lose face in your own eyes, and the more desperate you become for someone's approval. Within you is a void that should have been filled by self-esteem. When you attempt to fill it with the approval of others instead, the void grows deeper and the hunger for acceptance and approval grows stronger. The only solution is to summon the courage to honor your own judgment, frightening though that may be in the beginning.

The greatest barrier to achievement and success is not lack of talent or ability but rather the feeling that achievement and success, above a certain level, are outside our self-concept-our image of who we are and what is appropriate to us.

Where we see self esteem, we see self acceptance. High self esteem individual tend to avoid falling into an adversarial relationship with themselves.

Do not marry the enemy of your excitement.

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

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.