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.

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.

Live with integrity, respect the rights of other people, and follow your own bliss.

It is painful to face the self we know we have never had the integrity to honor and assert.

Productive achievement is a consequence and an expression of health and self-esteem, not its cause.

The ultimate test of our integrity is not how we deal with those whom we agree but how we deal with those who we do not agree.

In a world in which we are exposed to more information, more options, more philosophies, more perspectives than ever before, in which we must choose the values by which we will live (rather than unquestioningly follow some tradition for no better reason than that our own parents did), we need to be willing to stand on our own judgment and trust our own intelligence-to look at the world through our own eyes-to chart our course and think through how to achieve the future we want, to commit ourselves to continuous questioning and learning-to be, in a word, self-responsible.