The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.
Every time you suppress some part of yourself or allow others to play you small, you are in essence ignoring the owner's manual your creator gave you and destroying your design.
I like having my hair and face done, but I'm not going to lose weight because someone tells me to. I make music to be a musician not to be on the cover of Playboy.
Human potential is the same for all. Your feeling, 'I am of no value', is wrong. Absolutely wrong. You are deceiving yourself. We all have the power of thought — so what are you lacking? If you have will-power , then you can do anything. It is usually said that you are your own master.
Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.
When we look at a child, we see that sense of fullness, of intrinsic aliveness, of joy in being, is not the result of something else. There is value in just being oneself, it is not because of something one does or doesn't do. It is there in the beginning, when we are children, but slowly it gets lost.
There is no greater satisfaction for a just and well-meaning person than the knowledge that he has devoted his best energies to the service of the good cause.
The greatest difficulty is that men do not think enough of themselves, do not consider what it is that they are sacrificing when they follow in a herd, or when they cater for their establishment.
By creating so many illusory images of physical perfection, whether on store aisles or storefronts ads, magazine covers or TV show, we speak more to the profit margins of companies than the self-esteem of today's girls.
To men of a certain type The suspicion that they are incapable of loving Is as disturbing to their self-esteem As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.
We all place ourselves at various levels, and we are constantly falling from these heights. It is the falls we are ashamed of. Self-esteem is the cause of our shame, of our fall. It is this self-esteem that must be understood, and not the fall.